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The King's Fund was proud to host the Open Wounds exhibition from October 2022 to March 2023. This is an online and interactive version of that exhibition. Created and developed by Tottenham Rights, the exhibition explores the connections between health, racism and inequalities, and how this has affected generations of Black people.

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New Times or new circuits: recovering Sivanandan’s political economy

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Unravelling the Windrush myth: the confidential government communications that reveal authorities did not want Caribbean migrants to come to Britain

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Passengers disembarking the Windrush at Tilbury docks on June 22 1948. Eddie Worth/AP/Press Association Images

In the twilight hours of June 21 1948, a weathered five-deck troopship transporting 1,027 passengers moored off Gravesend on the south bank of the river Thames. That evening, immigration officials would begin carefully processing those aboard. The following afternoon, passengers would walk off the gangplank, finally stepping foot on British soil, disembarking at the port of Tilbury in Essex.

The ship that docked in the summer of 1948 was the HMT Empire Windrush. Before arriving in Gravesend, it already had a complicated and disturbing life: it was once a German vessel of war and fascist propaganda, and a mode of transport for Holocaust victims. But it was this one post-war journey from the Caribbean to England that would define it.

As a result of this singular crossing, the ship would come to embody impossibly grand tales of empire and migration, and become a seductive symbol for a country - and a dying empire - that desperately wanted to present itself as tolerant and fair-minded.

In the past few years, I have been working on an archival project that investigates the longer, more global, history of the Windrush. The project seeks to unravel what would become the potent mythology surrounding the ship, and to track how government officials reacted to the vessel and its passengers.

The Windrush was not the first post-war vessel to bring Caribbean migrants to the UK, and the number of migrants who disembarked had little impact on the UK's ethnic makeup at that time (immigration numbers from the Caribbean would increase more significantly in the 1950s and 60s, particularly in response to anticipated immigration controls).
This article is part of our Windrush 75 series, which marks the 75th anniversary of the HMT Empire Windrush arriving in Britain. The stories in this series explore the history and impact of the hundreds of passengers who disembarked to help rebuild after the second world war.
Despite this, the Windrush has taken on mythic proportions, with its name acting as a shorthand means of referring to all Caribbean migrants who came to Britain between 1948 and 1971. Some of this is due to the photographic and filmic archival images we have of the ship's arrival.

As we commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Windrush's mooring and pay tribute to the remarkable Windrush pioneers and the centuries-long history of black Britain, it is imperative to interrogate these myths.

Racism in the archives

The political context in which the Windrush arrived is important.

In the immediate post-war years, the British economy was in dire need of labour, and the government began to establish schemes to recruit workers from abroad, particularly from Europe and, in some cases, the colonies.

Industries including hospitality, healthcare and transport would actively reach out to workers throughout the Caribbean to fill much-needed vacancies. The development of these colonial worker schemes can be seen in government memorandums from the 1940s exploring, for example, the possibility of recruiting Barbadian women into the nursing industry.

At the same time, many Caribbean countries suffered from chronic unemployment and low wages (an economic condition created through the crushing legacy of colonial rule and enslavement). Without safety nets such as social security, the incentive for Caribbean workers to migrate to the UK was strong.

The migrants from Britain's colonies were often ex-servicemen who had fought for Britain in the second world war and, more importantly, subjects of the British empire. Through centuries of colonial rule and education, the cultural imaginary of Britain and Britishness was inculcated into each of the colonies. For better or worse, Britain was known as the "motherland" and migration to the heart of the empire was not controversial. As subjects of the empire, these colonial migrants had every right to travel and settle in Britain.

However, despite the need for labour, even before the Windrush docked, certain government officials were expressing concern about Caribbean migrants aboard another boat, the Ormonde, which had arrived in Liverpool in March of 1947.

In one confidential telegram dated May 1 1947, from the governor of Jamaica to the secretary of state for the colonies in London, it's clear that these "labourers" are not welcome:

I should be most grateful for any guidance which you feel able to give me in this matter. You may consider that it would be sufficient for the moment to issue a public statement here warning Jamaican labourers not to proceed to the United Kingdom on the ground that employment cannot readily be found for them. [However] the proposal to employ Italian or Polish labour in Great Britain has received wide publicity here, and such a public statement issued on the authority of His Majesty's Government is [therefore] likely to give rise to political criticism.

This request for guidance is merely a public relations issue. The hypocrisy evident in confidential telegrams such as this mark the contradiction between the legal rights of these migrants and their social acceptance into the British workforce.

The government was, at the time, creating programmes like the European Voluntary Worker (EVW) scheme, which would enable displaced, primarily, Eastern European migrants to fill the labour shortage in the country (such as the Polish labour mentioned in the telegram). Yet, the government was also simultaneously discouraging British subjects in the Caribbean from filling those gaps.

Put simply: here we see an early example of what would become the Windrush scandal, where the rights of British colonial subjects are severely undermined. This is a story about British imperial history that has long been neglected and which has only recently received mainstream media attention through the work of historians such as David Olusoga.

In a later telegram addressed to Miss V. Tavener at the Ministry of Labour and National Service in March 1948, we find another example of the deep racial anxiety around Caribbean migration. This time, it is in response to Jamaican workers who had arrived on the Almanzora six months before the Windrush, docking in December 1947 in Southampton.

The telegram is concerned about their employment. We learn about seven particular stowaways on the ship: after their release from prison, five of them would join the agricultural industry, four in Gloucestershire and one in Wiltshire:

We have submitted one other who is an ex-Merchant Navy man to London and although we cannot place him in Bristol because it is a 'White' Port, we are hoping that he will be engaged at Cardiff, or some other 'Coloured' Port.

In this telegram, a Caribbean former serviceman who fought for "King and Country" is relegated to a specific geography and labour force according not to his skill but his race. This is not the preamble to anything that resembles a harmonious, multi-racial Britain (as the modern myth of Windrush would later tell us). The admission that such migrants are being dispatched along racial lines explicitly outlines the segregation of black, colonial workers.

The 'wrong' kind of worker

By the time the Empire Windrush was scheduled to arrive at Tilbury, the apprehension exhibited by members of the government, colonial or otherwise, had further increased. A month before the ship was due to dock in May 1948, the acting governor of Jamaica sent an urgent telegram, this time via airmail so it would be swiftly received, warning the government about the boat's arrival:

I regret to inform you that more than 350 troop-deck passages by EMPIRE WINDRUSH ... have been booked by men who hope to find employment in the United Kingdom, and that it is likely that this number will be increased by another 100 before the vessel leaves. Most of them have no particular skill and few will have more than a few pounds on their arrival. Public announcements on the difficulty of obtaining work have not discouraged these bookings...

These are sinister words. First, the "facts" in the message are incorrect - we know from archival records that the migrants on board were skilled and trained.

Worst still, we find here another explicit expression of the disconnection between government policy and its enactment, one that nullifies the spirit of fair play and benevolence that was often attached to the popular myth of Windrush. These documents reveal not just an administrative anxiety around these migrants, but an account of how they were actively discouraged from entering the country.

Such exchanges demonstrate that officials were aware of the explosive political repercussions in deterring these migrants. As one government employee put it in his response to the Colonial Office:

It may become extremely embarrassing politically if, at a time of labour shortage, there should be nothing but discouragement for British subjects from the West Indies while we go to great trouble to get foreign workers (i.e. EVWs).

The embarrassment appears to stem not from the fact that these British subjects were being unjustly treated, but that denying them entry would expose the racial logic that secretly underpinned Britain's search for a revived labour force. In another government note, plans go so far as to suggest outsourcing Caribbean migrant labour and "employ[ing] the Jamaicans in East Africa on the production of ground nuts".

As the Windrush arrived in June 1948, the crescendo of dissent against these migrants rose to the highest levels of government. Responding to an enquiry regarding Jamaican workers and an ensuing letter signed by ten members of parliament conveying their concern about the ship, then prime minister Clement Attlee sought to quell the rising tide of apprehension:

It is traditional that British subjects, whether of Dominion or Colonial origin (and of whatever race or colour), should be freely admissible to the United Kingdom. That tradition is not, in my view, to be lightly discarded, particularly at a time when we are importing foreign labour in large numbers.

Attlee recognised the dangerous political fallout that would arise should the government execute its policies in an overtly discriminatory manner. The freedom of movement referenced in his reply is a marker of the so-called benevolence of British imperialism. To question the rights of these migrants would, he suggested, "weaken the good will and loyalty of the Colonies towards Great Britain".

In his attempt to quiet the growing opposition, Attlee was able to voice one of the key reasons why the Windrush stands out among the ships that would bring Caribbean migrants to Britain in the 1940s and 50s. As he warned:

Too much importance - too much publicity too - has been attached to the present argosy [the Empire Windrush] of the Jamaicans.

The Windrush became an emblem of history precisely because of the publicity around it. Its arrival occurred at a particular moment of political escalation, visible within these governmental files, where racial anxiety around issues of migration became an identifiable problem.

The anticipation surrounding its impending arrival in England thus increased. As the Windrush docked, it wasn't just ministers who were waiting, but also reporters and a Pathé film crew that would go on to place the ship firmly in the public imaginary.

A fateful moment on the gangplank

The now iconic, crackling black-and-white newsreel of the arrival of the Empire Windrush captures the coming lore around this moment.

In his coverage, the plummy-accented British interviewer, John Parsons, reduces the story to only a particular set of passengers: 500 Jamaican men seeking employment in the country. But we know from archival records that the ship sailed from Southampton to ports in Trinidad and Jamaica, Mexico, Cuba and Bermuda before dropping anchor at Gravesend.

The women and children aboard are excluded from the footage. So too are the men from the rest of the Caribbean - all with the right to settle and work in Britain - and also 66 Polish refugees fleeing Stalin.

One key moment from the newsreel is Parsons's interview with the Trinidadian Calypso musician Lord Kitchener (misidentified as Jamaican). Standing on the gangplank, Kitchener serenades Parsons with his now legendary song, London is the Place for Me. It's a musical gesture that appears to conjure a mood of hope, optimism and insinuated hospitality waiting at the heart of the empire's metropolis.

This monochrome story has been mythologised in recent popular representations of the ship's arrival. During Danny Boyle's 2012 London Olympic opening ceremony, a bombastic model of the Windrush was paraded and circled around the floor of the stadium. The ship's embrace into the spectacle of a progressive ceremony that championed civil rights, labour movements and the welfare state, entangled the imaginary of the Windrush's docking with patriotic notions of integrity and sportsmanship.

In the 2014 live-action adaptation of Michael Bond's children's book A Bear Called Paddington, we see a continuation of this starry-eyed portrayal of the Windrush story. As the young stowaway bear, Paddington, arrives in London from Peru for the first time, a contemporary rendition of Kitchener's London is the Place for Me cheerfully plays in the background. Thus, the calypso sung on the gangplank of the Windrush now becomes the soundtrack of a beloved British children's story of what it means to welcome a migrant figure.

Such romantic depictions demonstrate the political investment in obscuring the history of the ship. The Windrush's arrival became, especially in the late-20th and early-21st century, a feel-good media narrative about a benign empire that seamlessly transitioned from a period of vicious colonisation to one of open-mindedness and equity.

Few of these representations properly considered the brutality and racial hostility that awaited those Caribbean migrants on board, who would face discrimination in all aspects of British life for decades to come.

In Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands, Hazel Carby pinpoints the discrepancies in portrayals of the Windrush ever since, writing that the ship represented a "cultural and political break in time". As its arrival gathered immense importance throughout the years, a profound and misleading mythology developed around it.

"Before the Windrush," Carby notes, the myth was that "Britain was white". The ship, it was believed, brought black people from the colonies to the centre of empire for the first time.

That myth would mutate even further. Particularly after the 50th anniversary of the ship's docking in 1998, the Windrush appeared more and more as a symbol of national uplift and benign imperialism - if such a thing is possible. As the writers Mike and Trevor Phillips put it, the vessel became in that commemorative moment an "irresistible" icon that inaugurated the " rise of a multi-racial Britain ".

These days, it is impossible to speak of the ship as representative of a story of racial tolerance and justice amid the ongoing Windrush scandal (reported by Guardian journalist Amelia Gentleman in 2017), where pension-aged British citizens, the children of the first generation of Windrush migrants, are being "illegalised", detained and/or deported.

But going through the archives, we see in government memos from the 1940s clear signs of the scandal to come decades later. The documents reveal how British officials sought to delegitimise - couched in terms of "discouragement" - the rights of these early colonial migrants.

The unofficial attempt to curb migration from the Caribbean in the 1940s would find a juridical voice in restrictive immigration policies from the 1960s to the present, which would officially delegitimise the rights of these British subjects.

From Germany, to Tilbury, to Algiers

Undoing the Windrush mythology requires not only a focus on the political and administrative realities around its arrival, but also a mapping of the ship's nautical life.

Built in 1930 by the German company Blohm and Voss in Hamburg, it was part of a series of cruise ships that would take Germans to South America. The ship's original name was the MV Monte Rosa and, during the 1930s, it would ferry thousands of German migrants and tourists to countries such as Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina. Passengers included members of the Nazi movement who sought to spread fascist ideas.

Once the second world war broke out, the Monte Rosa transported supplies and personnel, supporting German warships and naval attacks against the Allies. It also transported Jewish Norwegians who were caged beneath the decks and sent to Auschwitz (a gruesome history outlined in Paul Arnott's book Windrush: A Ship Through Time). As Arnott writes of the Monte Rosa at that time:

In one respect, she was a migrant ship - in another, a vessel promulgating the Nazi movement at sea.

At the end of the war in 1945, the British captured the Monte Rosa in Kiel, Germany. By 1947, the boat had become part of His Majesty's troopships (HMT) and was renamed Empire Windrush - christened after the river Windrush, a quiet tributary of the Thames that begins in the Cotswold Hills in south-west England.

The ship embarked on a voyage to the Caribbean in May 1948 - the only journey it would make to that part of the world, but one that would disproportionately define its history. Afterwards, it would transport British troops throughout the Korean War and the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya.

In March 1954, the Windrush made its last journey carrying British troops and their families from East Asia back to England. After boarding the last of its passengers at Port Said in Egypt and on its way to Southampton, the ship's engine room caught fire 50 miles off the coast of Algiers. Nearly all of the passengers, including men, women, children and infants, were rescued by four nearby ships before the burning vessel was abandoned at sea, where it soon sank.

This fire would become a source of intense controversy. In the following months, a formal inquiry investigated whether the ship was legally seaworthy, given its recorded history of disrepair.

The response of the British media to the sinking of the ship is noteworthy. Because so many survived, the press claimed this sunken ship as yet another symbol of the "superiority" of the British national character and, by extension, the British empire. As the Birmingham Post put it:

There is reason for pride, as well as for deep thankfulness, at the outcome of the dire emergency that so swiftly overtook the troopship Empire Windrush in the early hours of Sunday morning.

In recounting the "calm and considerate" actions of the crew, the newspaper noted that such dispositions deserve mention "because it is so much in the national tradition".

Thus, even as it sank, the publicity around the Windrush reiterated the ship's benevolent qualities. This representation echoed prime minister Attlee's comments regarding the distinctive British tradition of fair play concerning colonial migration. Amid the context of a crumbling empire, the ship was again mythologised in the service of preserving a benign sensibility of British imperial history.

Today, as Windrush scandal victims, and survivors, continue to emerge - with compensation only very slowly being dispatched - the complicated history of the HMT Empire Windrush has much to teach us about how we view and understand Britain's imperial past and present.

This particular ship has always been entangled within the British empire's publicity machine. As we mark the 75th anniversary of its Tilbury docking, and commemorate the remarkable impact these post-war Caribbean migrants and their descendants have had on the cultural life of the UK, it is imperative to avoid the lure of this imperial persona. It is not the romance of the Windrush we should remember, but the untended racial injustices that have endured since the ship's arrival.

You can download the e-book here. Thank you for your interest.

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Unravelling the Windrush myth: the confidential government communications that reveal authorities did not want Caribbean migrants to come to Britain

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The UK needed workers, but government documents reveal British subjects in the Caribbean were still actively discouraged from entering the country

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Anti-antisemitism: a proxy war on racism

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Anti-antisemitism: a proxy war on racism

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the O'Neill–Lancet Commission on Racism, Structural Discrimination, and Global Health

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the O'Neill–Lancet Commission on Racism, Structural Discrimination, and Global Health

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The Combahee River Collective and Intersectionality in the Age of Identity

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The Combahee River Collective and Intersectionality in the Age of Identity

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Content Warning: This article contains discussion of racist and transphobic violence. 1974. Martin Luther King Jr. has been dead for six years and the issue of African American Civil Rights continues to divide the US. The Equal Rights Amendment, promising legislative equality on the basis of sex, battles for state ratifications as Second Wave Feminism sweeps the nation.

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What Scientists Mean When They Say 'Race' Is Not Genetic

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What Scientists Mean When They Say 'Race' Is Not Genetic

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https://www.huffpost.com/entry/race-is-not-biological_n_56b8db83e4b04f9b57da89ed

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Racial categories are weak proxies for genetic diversity and need to be phased out 

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Racial categories are weak proxies for genetic diversity and need to be phased out 

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https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-construct-scientists-argue/

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by Ahmed Olayinka Sule Follow @Alatenumo

In the aftermath of Usain Bolt's victory in the Olympic men's 100 metre final, Murad Ahmed of the Financial Times wrote an article titled " Usain Bolt and why Jamaican sprinters are so fast", in which he addressed the issue of Jamaica's sprinting dominance. However, rather than analyse the various factors contributing to Jamaica's sporting success, the article rehashed the old white supremacist narrative about black excellence; one that declares there has to be an alternative explanation besides hard work, determination, and environmental factors to justify black success.

Since the Beijing Olympics, Jamaica has become the world's number one sprinting nation. Prior to the 2008 Games, Jamaica's track and field team won a total of 7 gold medals. Since Beijing, they have more than doubled that total. With a population of just 2.7 million people, Jamaica is punching well above its weight athletically, attracting the attention of many in the West.

Genetics has become an oft-cited reason used by Western commentators and scientists as an explanation. Shortly before the London 2012 Olympics, Michael Johnson, presented a documentary, titled Survival of the Fastest, in which he argued that present day Caribbean athletes inherited a superior gene due to slave owners selecting only the fittest slaves for onward shipment to the Caribbean and America.

Another argument regularly used to explain Jamaica's success is the widely quoted fast-twitch muscles theory, which scientists claim enables black athletes to run faster. Jon Entine, in an article titled The DNA Olympics - Jamaicans Win Sprinting 'Genetic Lottery' - and Why We Should All Care, wrote, " Bolt and his Jamaican teammates are members of a tiny slice of the world population-elite athletes who trace their ancestry to western and central Africa-whose body types and physiology have been uniquely shaped by thousands of years of evolution to run fast. "

Authors have written books such as "Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports And Why We're Afraid To Talk About It" and "The Bolt Supremacy: Inside Jamaica's Sprint Factory" to explore the reason for Jamaica's achievements. Factors such as their well-run inter-collegiate programme, the prevalence of excellent coaches, the impact of their sprinters victories on future generations of runners, and the fact that sport is a space where blacks and whites compete without as many structural barriers as in other walks of life, are often dismissed.

The Olympics is the greatest sporting event in the world, featuring 11,000 athletes from 207 countries competing for 306 set of medals in 28 different sports. Despite the variety of athletes competing at the Games, commentators from the Western world have a tendency to fix their gaze on the few black athletes who excel in the sprints (a subset of one of the 28 sports in the Games).

To suggest that a so-called fast twitch contributes to black athletes running fast is simplistic at best and racist at worse. As Harry Edwards, the American sociologist put it; " The myth of the black male's racially determined, inherent physical and athletic superiority over the white male, rivals the myth of black sexual superiority in antiquity."

A look at the history books reveals that white supremacy has often used pseudo-science to justify the inferiority of black people, such as asserting black people's approximation to monkeys. The "fast twitch" theory is a modern day extension of the black brute stereotype, only this time around, black folks have been relegated to fast running animals.

While the focus has been on the genetic make-up of Jamaican athletes who only started dominating a minute aspect of the sporting universe from 2008, such rigorous analysis is seldom applied to successful white athletes who have dominated other sports. Furthermore, Western commentators have ignored other smaller white-majority nations that have punched above their weight.

Medalspercapita.com examines Olympic glory in proportion to a country's population. Gold medal per capita is the total population of a country divided by the number of gold medals that country has won at the Olympics. An analysis of the top twenty countries with the highest Gold medal per capita places the much scrutinised Jamaica 10th on the table. In contrast countries like Finland, Hungary, Sweden, Norway, New Zealand and Denmark rank 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 9th respectively. Yet questions are never asked about whether the genetic coding of athletes from these countries enables them to excel.

Furthermore, Britain ranks 19th on the table, China ranks 77th, and India ranks 101st. Shouldn't the relevant question be: Why does Great Britain, an island nation of roughly 65 million produce Olympians that so easily trounce those from more populous countries like China and India?

Proponents of the "Black Athletic Gene" often argue that white people excel in sports that use props and technology, such as fencing and cycling, but not in track and field where you have to "lace 'em up". Yet this ignores successful white sprinters such as Dafne Schippers and Sally Pearson. While the white gaze has been fixed on Kenyan and Jamaican runners, they have turned a blind eye to white athletes who dominate events like the Ironman Triathlon, an event which comprises of a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bicycle ride and a marathon 26.2-mile run.

The most successful Ironman triathletes: Craig Alexander; Mark Allen; Luc Van Lierde; and Dave Scott are all white. Furthermore, the ultra-marathon, which is a long distance footrace longer than 100 km, is also dominated by white athletes. Eight out of the nine best performances in ultra-marathons (ranging from 162km to 426 km) were posted by white runners.

Rather than seek answers to Jamaica's sprinting dominance, perhaps the West should seek answers to the following: Why are no questions raised when twenty-one white men compete in a 1,000 metre Kayak heat event, yet eyebrows are raised when eight black sprinters compete in an Olympic 100 metre event? Why studies are conducted to find out whether black athletes have a "fast twitch", yet no studies are carried out to examine whether there is a form of "twitch" that makes white ultra-marathoners run longer, faster and harder? Why is Britain's recent Olympic success attributed to investment and excellent organisation, while Jamaica's success is attributed to nothing more than genetics?

Ahmed Sule is a CFA Charterholder, Chartered Accountant, photojournalis and social critic. He also obtained a Certificate in Photojournalism at the University of Arts London. He has also worked on various photojournalism projects including Obama: The Impact, Jesus Christ: The Impact, The Williams Sisters etc. He cites Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Kwame Nkrumah and W.E. Du Bois as his major influences. Find him on Twitter @Alatenumo

There's sport, and then there's the Olympic and Paralympic Games. It's an event like no other. Over the next few weeks this series, curated by Shane Thomas, will cover the medals, the nationalism, the competition, the corporatisation, the exploitation, and the sporting brilliance of Rio 2016.
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by Ahmed Olayinka Sule In the aftermath of Usain Bolt's victory in the Olympic men's 100 metre final, Murad Ahmed of the Financial Times wrote an article titled "Usain Bolt and why Jamaican sprinters are so fast", in which he addressed the issue of Jamaica's sprinting dominance.

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Black & LGBTQ: Approaching Intersectional Conversations

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Black & LGBTQ: Approaching Intersectional Conversations

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Black & LGBTQ: Approaching Intersectional Conversations

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Learn how to approach intersectional conversations in this guide that focuses on understanding and listening to LGBTQ people of color.

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INTERVIEW WITH IRA BERLIN
edited transcript

Ira Berlin is Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Maryland. He is author of Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in America and other books.

The early Virginia setters discover a crop they can grow for export, tobacco. What do they need to do so profitably?

The Jamestown settlers came here to get rich. And it takes them a while. They go through a rough time called The Starving Time in Virginia - which indeed is a rather desperate period. But eventually they discover a commodity, tobacco, which does what they hope it will do. It is not nearly as profitable as sugar. But it is profitable. And that of course transforms Virginia.

We call that the Tobacco Revolution and it transforms Virginia from a very marginal kind of society to a society in which some people can get very, very rich. And of course what they need to get very, very rich is labor. But labor is in very short supply in the New World. It is in particularly short supply in Virginia because a good part of the Native American population has already died off because of warfare with these invaders and in larger measure because of disease. The microbes turn out to be extraordinarily efficient and the people of the New World don't have resistance to a variety of European diseases.

So these potential tobacco barons need labor. And they will pretty much take it wherever they can, wherever they can get it. One source of course is the Native American population, and they try to use them as laborers. Another source is the European population and they will use them as laborers, as free labor but also coerced labor, so-called Indentured Servants. Indentured servants are people who are essentially enslaved for a period of years. And they will also call upon Africans as laborers.

What is interesting about what happens in Virginia is that the Virginians, and also other peoples in the Chesapeake region, in Maryland as well, do not establish the system of slavery immediately. The system is rather open. And many of these people who are of African descent who enter Virginia fall into the status of indentured servants.

Some people of African descent escape from these forms of coerced labor, and begin to behave pretty much like everybody else in the Chesapeake - that is, they try to gain access to some land and some labor to work the land, whether it is free or coerced, whether it is indentured or enslaved. And once they do they begin to do pretty well for themselves.

What were the differences that made a difference in early Virginia?

The 17th century Chesapeake area is indeed a multi-racial society. Native Americans, people of African descent, and people of European descent are jumbled up in a variety of ways and they do the kinds of things that people do when they get jumbled up together: They work together. They play together. They fight. They sleep together.

And until we get the formation of plantations, until we get this new institution which demands labor and benefits from squeezing people and wringing out of them as much work as you possibly can, the behavior and the interaction of Europeans and Africans and Native Americans is remarkably open.

They distinguish themselves in a variety of ways. They distinguish themselves by religion - differences between Protestants and Catholics of course are of enormous significance. They distinguish themselves by nationality - distinguishing between Dutch and French and English and Iberian peoples. And of course the English people distinguish between themselves and Scotch and Welsh. And all of them distinguish themselves from the Irish, who are viewed as yet another case entirely from the English perspective.

But however they distinguish themselves, they are arranged in a hierarchical order in which a few are on top and many are on bottom. Hierarchy is ubiquitous in this world. The Kingdom is a hierarchy; there is only one king. The church is a hierarchy, whether you view it from the perspective of Rome and the pope, or whether you view it from the perspective of Canterbury and the Archbishop. The army is a hierarchy, with a general in charge. Wealth is distributed in a hierarchical way. And most importantly, the family is a hierarchy in which the father stands at the head.

And the idea of the father writ large as the pope, as the king, as the general, is something which unites all of these hierarchies - and makes the notion that hierarchy is providential. It's the way God ordered the world. So some people are on the top and others on the bottom. Whether they are indentured servants, slaves, or property-less, free laborers, it's not viewed as anything unusual.

These providential hierarchies, of course, is what distinguishes this world from the radically different world of post- July 4th 1776 when suddenly equality becomes the standard currency. And the new presumption is that all men are created equal.

How did Bacon's Rebellion mark a turning point in American ideas of race, giving birth to, as Edmund Morgan says, both black slavery and American freedom?

Bacon's Rebellion is an event which begins to redefine notions of race on the North American continent, or at least in the Chesapeake region.

Before Bacon's Rebellion we certainly have distinctions made between blacks and whites, and we certainly have attitudes on the part of whites and presumably on the part of blacks where they differentiate themselves and where they probably think each is superior to the other.

Nonetheless, we see them behaving pretty much the same way. Some numbers of people of African descent have moved into the land owning class, are sometimes owning the servants, are connected with churches, are cognizant of the legal system and so on.

And of course substantial numbers of people of European descent are caught in a system of coerced labor called indentured servitude. And indentured servants, whether they are black or white, are pretty much treated the same way as slaves. Very badly.

Bacon's Rebellion changes that, and what seems to be crucial in changing that is the consolidation after Bacon's Rebellion of a planter class. The planters had not been able to control this rowdy labor force of servants and slaves. But soon after Bacon's Rebellion they increasingly distinguish between people of African descent and people of European descent. They enact laws which say that people of African descent are hereditary slaves. And they increasingly give some power to white independent white farmers and land holders.

That increased power is not equality. Dirt farmers are not elected to the House of Burgess in Virginia; the planters monopolize those offices. But they do participate in the political system. In other words we see slavery and freedom being invented at the same moment.

Now what is interesting about this is that we normally say that slavery and freedom are opposite things -that they are diametrically opposed. But what we see here in Virginia in the late 17th century, around Bacon's Rebellion, is that freedom and slavery are created at the same moment.

How do racial ideas change after Bacon's Rebellion?

What interests us here is how that sense of Otherness continually gains new and different meanings over time and place. In Virginia prior to Bacon's Rebellion we had a much more open system. We have black planters and white planters, black indentured servants and slaves, we have white people who are indentured servants and living in un-freedom.

In that kind of world, distinctions between black and white are of course made. But very few people talk about black people as being stupid or dull or ignorant or dirty or lazy. When they speak of Anthony Johnson [a black planter] there may be disdain in their voice, but generally it is that perhaps he is too clever, he is manipulative. He is untrustworthy. He is a little bit too smooth for them. But somebody like Anthony Johnson has been so successful that it would be foolish to denounce him as stupid or lazy or unproductive.

When we move into the post-Bacon's Rebellion world where slavery and the plantation economy are in place, where black people are arriving in large numbers from Africa, the view of black people changes very rapidly. It is not simply slavery that transforms notions of race. It is this plantation slavery, the advent of the plantation and disciplined, exploitative labor that begins to transform notions of race.

And it is that which I am concerned with here. It's not the origins of ideas of race but how race is continually transformed and given different meanings in different circumstances.

Why did Africans become the slaves of choice in North America?

The question of why Africans become the people of choice to be enslaved in the New World is a question that doesn't have a simple answer. Or it certainly doesn't have an agreed upon answer. There is certainly a great need for labor in the New World, generally because the Native American peoples die at enormous rates when confronted with the diseases of the Old World, be it African or be it European.

In some ways what we see taking place after Christopher Columbus in the post Columbian world, is a re-peopling of the world because of the enormous mortality rates and the holocaust of Native American peoples.

But still, we had a choice of laborers - so why not the European laborers? We know that Europeans have no problem chopping each other up into small pieces in a series of wars. The Protestants don't like Catholics and Catholics don't like Protestants. And from the English perspective, there seems to be one particular population that does in fact seem slavish or appropriate to enslave. And they, of course, are the Irish.

It is precisely at the same time that the English are settling the New World that they are conquering Ireland. They do so with all of the brutality of the destruction of Native American peoples. And they do so with all of the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade.

The Irish are viewed as a lesser people because they have a kind of semi- nomadic existence. They are viewed as lesser people because of their organization into clans. They are viewed as a lesser people because they are not simply heathen they are something worse than heathen from the English perspective: they are Catholic.

So it is a real question in the 17th century why the English enslave Africans. And I don't think there is an easy or an agreed upon answer to that. Some claim that the question turns upon color distinctions, that there are certain things you can't do to people of European descent, of white skin.

Frankly, I am uncomfortable with those explanations. I think the explanation may lie more in accessibility, the ability to access slave labor. And then a certain precedent is established once the system is going. By the 17th century African slavery has existed for almost two centuries, which in some ways makes it easier to move against Africans than to move against people of European descent, and against the Irish.

When is slavery as an institution first challenged on ethical grounds?

The questioning of slavery as an institution is a new, radical and recent idea. Questioning the validity, the sanctity, the morality of the institution of slavery comes very, very late in the history of the world. Not till the end of the 18th century, not until the Age of Revolution do we see the institution of slavery questioned. Up until that time slavery is not only ubiquitous, slavery is sanctioned by the state, by the church, by the Christian bible, by the Koran, and by the various texts of other religions.

So this questioning of slavery is a radical departure from the past. And it separates our modern world, in which slavery seems a ridiculously hateful, spiteful, backwards and oppressive institution, from the past. And so this becomes a major dividing point in human history.

Why does Thomas Jefferson, the apostle of freedom, become the first prominent American to give voice to suspicions of innate black inferiority? Why do the new ideas of equality give rise to racial thinking?

Thomas Jefferson is often thought of as a paradoxical figure. He is the great spokesman for equality, the author of the Declaration of Independence, a man seeped in the egalitarian revolutionary traditions of the late 18th century, and he likes to think of himself that way.

Of course Jefferson was also a slave holder. And perhaps more than a slave holder. It is he perhaps more than anybody else in his Notes on the State of Virginia who first broaches it "as a possibility," he says, that black people are different than white people, that Africans are different than Europeans.

And this difference is not simply a product of circumstance, it is not simply a product of the environment but Jefferson broaches this possibility that it is something much deeper, something innate. We would say in our own language - Jefferson didn't have this language - we would say genetic. Jefferson thus in some ways becomes the father of a school of racial thought which of course stands in many ways in opposition to the great egalitarian tradition and this is viewed as a great paradox.

From my perspective it is not so much a paradox. It seems to me what we have is that Jefferson the egalitarian and the slaver holder perhaps more than anybody else is a person who has thought very deeply about this. He wrestles with these concerns. And his wrestling with these concerns takes him in a variety of directions.

The American Revolution is an extraordinarily important event in world history. And combined with the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the revolutions in Latin America, this Age of Revolution transforms not simply our own nation but transforms the world as well.

After the American Revolution, after the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Declaration of Independence, the presumption is that all men are created equal. Equality is the point. And what then has to be explained for the very first time in world history is inequality. And why inequality exists. In other words, if all men are created equal, why are some men and women still slaves?

And the explanation for the persistence of slavery can be: "Well, perhaps there is something wrong with that notion of equality." In which case the whole notion of the post Revolutionary world, the whole notion of American nationality, is also wrong.

Or the explanation can be: "Perhaps these people who are enslaved are not quite men." And of course that leads us to a whole sea change in terms of racial thought.

So, the American Revolution gives rise to a tradition of freedom AND a tradition of racialization?

The American Revolution becomes a critical marker in our understanding of America's racial history. From the American Revolution come these two great and oppositional traditions in American life.

First are those people who take seriously the ideals of the American Revolution, that all men are created equal. And out of that radical egalitarian tradition comes the tradition of racial equality, comes the tradition of abolition, and many other egalitarian traditions.

In some ways the great spokesperson for this tradition are slaves and former slaves themselves - Richard Allen to Frederick Douglass through Martin Luther King. They become the great spokesmen for the American egalitarian tradition and continually hose us down with the rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence, reminding us of our heritage.

But also out of the Declaration of Independence comes a darker tradition. That tradition is saying that while we accept the notion that all men are created equal but then perhaps some of those people who are enslaved are not quite men. We will keep our ideas of American nationality but we will write certain people out of the human family.

And that is a tradition which also developed and comes to fruition in the in the 19th century, in the great defenders of the institution of slavery, the opponents to emancipation, the protagonists of segregation and Jim Crow.

And so again, this one moment when we become a nation, becomes critical for our understanding of both American nationality and race. Race and freedom are of one piece, are born at that same moment. And that is why we are continually struggling with it all the way into the 21st century.

How do anti-black prejudices grow into an ideology of white supremacy?

The 19th century is a period of radical transformation of slavery. And with the radical transformation of slavery comes a radical transformation of ideas about race. Some of those ideas are a product of the slave holder's response to the growing anti-slavery movement. Public opinion throughout the world is turning against the institution of slavery. Slaveholders have to defend this institution of slavery in new ways.

And this pushes them to new ideas about race. They start talking about the childlike nature of slaves, simple folk incapable of full adulthood, of protecting themselves, in need of a master. Hence slavery, they claim, is a benevolent institution. Very, very few slave holders spoke about their slaves that way in the 18th century.

Some slave holders seemed to go in the opposite direction, depicting slaves as inhuman beasts, always ready to revolt, to plant a hatchet in the back of their owner's head. So, if we have the image of the slave child, we also have the image of the slave beast. They too are in need of a master lest they run rough-shod over society raping, pillaging, destroying civilization. So notions about race don't remain constant. They are constantly changing. And in some measure they are constantly changing because the institution of slavery itself is constantly changing.

And it is that connection between the structure of slavery and how the institution works, and how masters and slaves struggle against each other, which of course is part of the way in which ideas about race are redefined.

Why doesn't the abolition of slavery bring an end to anti-black feelings? Instead, racism becomes even more virulent at the end of the 19th century.

If one of the markers of America's racial history is the advent of the plantation, and another marker is the American Revolution, certainly the third stop is the Civil War and Reconstruction that follows. With the Civil War of course there is a reclaiming of the great egalitarian tradition, the great tradition of the revolution, and of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal.

It is upon that foundation upon which emancipation rests. Indeed, one of the things that we see both during the Civil War in the northern states and after the Civil War throughout the nation is a real recession of the color line, a real redrawing of lines in attitudes, in ideas, in laws, that are passed. Which open up the society to equal participation in a variety of different ways.

Black people of course are freed, they are made citizens, they participate in the great triumph of the Union. Some 200,000 black men fight in the Union army. That gives them a claim to citizenship that they continue to advertise and which in some measure is recognized.

Reconstruction immediately following the Civil War is a great egalitarian experiment and its successes are numerous. It ultimately fails and of course in its wake comes Jim Crow, comes segregation, comes lynching as well. And with that comes another transformation of notions of race, transformations which in some ways draw perhaps even a harder line between white and black, draw even meaner racial distinctions.

Slavery, for whatever else it was, brought white people and black people together; they had to work together. It made no sense to segregate a slave. By defining a person as a slave you already distinguished them from a free person, distinguished white from black.

But once those legal distinctions disappeared and if you wanted to maintain the social distinctions, you had to create a whole other set of institutions which are eventually called segregation. Moreover, since the line between black and white was no longer hedged by the institution of slavery, you had to create other fences, other barriers to make sure you couldn't confuse a white and black. After all, black people were now citizens of this nation. They had all of the rights of citizens; you had to find ways to either eliminate those rights or to make sure that they were not exercised.

And of course this unleashes an enormous amount of violence, violence that is in some ways implicit in the institution of slavery, but must be explicit in maintaining the distinctions between whites and blacks in the post-Emancipation world. And the more competitive that blacks become with white people, of course, the more dangerous they seem.

One of the interesting things is that many of the institutions that develop in the post-Reconstruction United States had their origins not so much in the slave South but in the free North. It is in the North where the first system of segregation first begins. It is there where race riots first appear. These institutions of course in some ways are superfluous to a slave society.

Weren't 19th century European immigrants 'raced'?

During the late 19th century the nature of immigration to the Americas changes. The 17th and 18th centuries are the great centuries of African migration. The overwhelming majority of people who come to the New World before 1800 are Africans. In the 19th century that changes. The slave trade is closed and European immigration ultimately becomes the dominant form of immigration.

Most of these European peoples are at the bottom of American society. They are the workers and they are the day laborers, and they are factory workers in particular.

Many of the things which are said about these European workers are the same thing which are said at various times about people of African descent. Despite the fact that they are working people, they are lazy. They are untrustworthy. They can't show up to the factory on time. They are undisciplined. They are improvident. And all of these things attach themselves at various times to a whole series of European peoples, beginning with the Irish, then Germans in the 1860s, then a whole series of eastern Europeans and northern Europeans - Italians, Slavs, and Nordic people as well.

In some ways this is a process of racialization, of defining people at the bottom as Others. One of the ways of course that these new immigrants try to protect themselves is to distinguish themselves from that furthest pole of Otherness. They to try to distinguish themselves from black people. And in the process of doing this, they often adopt the very language which is used against them.

So, once again, we have these two great traditions. One tradition of equality coming out of the Declaration of Independence and this is a tradition that many immigrant and working peoples identify themselves with. And then there is that other tradition of defining people as Others - that is, separating them out.

What does it mean to be an American?

Defining ourselves as a people means defining who is in but it also means defining who is out. These are reciprocal processes.

I think for all of us it begins with the Declaration of Independence. It begins with Jefferson's great promise of American nationality. And extends through the Abolitionist Movement, through the Feminist Movement, through the Labor Movement, and an attempt in some ways to fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence. The struggle for emancipation during the Civil War is part of this struggle. So is the struggle for decent wages, the Civil Rights Movement. We define who we are by identifying our values and saying collectively that this is what we believe.

But at the very same time when we are doing this we are also defining who we are not. And defining who we are not means sometimes defining groups of people as the Other. Sometimes it means demonizing other people as we distinguish ourselves from them.

It seems to me that what is most painful about this process is that these are two sides to the same coin. The very process of defining who is in also is a process of defining who is out. And hence an Other maybe will always be with us. Even as we try to celebrate what is best and what is most universal in American life.

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RACE - The Power of an Illusion . Background Readings | PBS

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INTERVIEW WITH IRA BERLIN edited transcript Ira Berlin is Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Maryland. He is author of Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in America and other books.

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Racism is real but Race is not. Let's get genetic

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Racism is real but Race is not. Let's get genetic

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Please note that this article includes an image of human remains.

A friend of mine with Central American, Southern European, and West African ancestry is lactose intolerant. Drinking milk products upsets her stomach, and so she avoids them. About a decade ago, because of her low dairy intake, she feared that she might not be getting enough calcium, so she asked her doctor for a bone density test. He responded that she didn't need one because "blacks do not get osteoporosis."

My friend is not alone. The view that black people don't need a bone density test is a longstanding and common myth. A 2006 study in North Carolina found that out of 531 African American and Euro-American women screened for bone mineral density, only 15 percent were African American women-despite the fact that African American women made up almost half of that clinical population. A health fair in Albany, New York, in 2000, turned into a ruckus when black women were refused free osteoporosis screening. The situation hasn't changed much in more recent years.

Meanwhile, FRAX, a widely used calculator that estimates one's risk of osteoporotic fractures, is based on bone density combined with age, sex, and, yes, "race." Race, even though it is never defined or demarcated, is baked into the fracture risk algorithms.

Let's break down the problem.

First, presumably based on appearances, doctors placed my friend and others into a socially defined race box called "black," which is a tenuous way to classify anyone.

Race is a highly flexible way in which societies lump people into groups based on appearance that is assumed to be indicative of deeper biological or cultural connections. As a cultural category, the definitions and descriptions of races vary. "Color" lines based on skin tone can shift, which makes sense, but the categories are problematic for making any sort of scientific pronouncements.

Second, these medical professionals assumed that there was a firm genetic basis behind this racial classification, which there isn't.

Third, they assumed that this purported racially defined genetic difference would protect these women from osteoporosis and fractures.
The view that black people don't need a bone density test is a longstanding and common myth.
Some studies suggest that African American women-meaning women whose ancestry ties back to Africa-may indeed reach greater bone density than other women, which could be protective against osteoporosis. But that does not mean "being black"-that is, possessing an outward appearance that is socially defined as "black"-prevents someone from getting osteoporosis or bone fractures. Indeed, this same research also reports that African American women are more likely to die after a hip fracture. The link between osteoporosis risk and certain racial populations may be due to lived differences such as nutrition and activity levels, both of which affect bone density.

But more important: Geographic ancestry is not the same thing as race. African ancestry, for instance, does not tidily map onto being "black" (or vice versa). In fact, a 2016 study found wide variation in osteoporosis risk among women living in different regions within Africa. Their genetic risks have nothing to do with their socially defined race.

When medical professionals or researchers look for a genetic correlate to "race," they are falling into a trap: They assume that geographic ancestry, which does indeed matter to genetics, can be conflated with race, which does not. Sure, different human populations living in distinct places may statistically have different genetic traits-such as sickle cell trait (discussed below)-but such variation is about local populations (people in a specific region), not race.

Like a fish in water, we've all been engulfed by " the smog " of thinking that "race" is biologically real. Thus, it is easy to incorrectly conclude that "racial" differences in health, wealth, and all manner of other outcomes are the inescapable result of genetic differences.

The reality is that socially defined racial groups in the U.S. and most everywhere else do differ in outcomes. But that's not due to genes. Rather, it is due to systemic differences in lived experience and institutional racism.

Communities of color in the United States, for example, often have reduced access to medical care, well-balanced diets, and healthy environments. They are often treated more harshly in their interactions with law enforcement and the legal system. Studies show that they experience greater social stress, including endemic racism, that adversely affects all aspects of health. For example, babies born to African American women are more than twice as likely to die in their first year than babies born to non-Hispanic Euro-American women.

As a professor of biological anthropology, I teach and advise college undergraduates. While my students are aware of inequalities in the life experiences of different socially delineated racial groups, most of them also think that biological "races" are real things. Indeed, more than half of Americans still believe that their racial identity is "determined by information contained in their DNA."

For the longest time, Europeans thought that the sun revolved around the Earth. Their culturally attuned eyes saw this as obvious and unquestionably true. Just as astronomers now know that's not true, nearly all population geneticists know that dividing people into races neither explains nor describes human genetic variation.

Yet this idea of race-as-genetics will not die. For decades, it has been exposed to the sunlight of facts, but, like a vampire, it continues to suck blood-not only surviving but causing harm in how it can twist science to support racist ideologies. With apologies for the grisly metaphor, it is time to put a wooden stake through the heart of race-as-genetics. Doing so will make for better science and a fairer society.

In 1619, the first people from Africa arrived in Virginia and became integrated into society. Only after African and European bond laborers unified in various rebellions did colony leaders recognize the "need" to separate laborers. "Race" divided indentured Irish and other Europeans from enslaved Africans, and reduced opposition by those of European descent to the intolerable conditions of enslavement. What made race different from other prejudices, including ethnocentrism (the idea that a given culture is superior), is that it claimed that differences were natural, unchanging, and God-given. Eventually, race also received the stamp of science.

Over the next decades, Euro-American natural scientists debated the details of race, asking questions such as how often the races were created (once, as stated in the Bible, or many separate times), the number of races, and their defining, essential characteristics. But they did not question whether races were natural things. They reified race, making the idea of race real by unquestioning, constant use.

In the 1700s, Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy and someone not without ego, liked to imagine himself as organizing what God created. Linnaeus famously classified our own species into races based on reports from explorers and conquerors.

The race categories he created included Americanus, Africanus, and even Monstrosus (for wild and feral individuals and those with birth defects), and their essential defining traits included a biocultural mélange of color, personality, and modes of governance. Linnaeus described Europeaus as white, sanguine, and governed by law, and Asiaticus as yellow, melancholic, and ruled by opinion. These descriptions highlight just how much ideas of race are formulated by social ideas of the time.

In line with early Christian notions, these "racial types" were arranged in a hierarchy: a great chain of being, from lower forms to higher forms that are closer to God. Europeans occupied the highest rungs, and other races were below, just above apes and monkeys.

So, the first big problems with the idea of race are that members of a racial group do not share "essences," Linnaeus' idea of some underlying spirit that unified groups, nor are races hierarchically arranged. A related fundamental flaw is that races were seen to be static and unchanging. There is no allowance for a process of change or what we now call evolution.

There have been lots of efforts since Charles Darwin's time to fashion the typological and static concept of race into an evolutionary concept. For example, Carleton Coon, a former president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, argued in The Origin of Races (1962) that five races evolved separately and became modern humans at different times.

One nontrivial problem with Coon's theory, and all attempts to make race into an evolutionary unit, is that there is no evidence. Rather, all the archaeological and genetic data point to abundant flows of individuals, ideas, and genes across continents, with modern humans evolving at the same time, together.

A few pundits such as Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute and science writers such as Nicholas Wade, formerly of The New York Times, still argue that even though humans don't come in fixed, color-coded races, dividing us into races still does a decent job of describing human genetic variation. Their position is shockingly wrong. We've known for almost 50 years that race does not describe human genetic variation.

In 1972, Harvard evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin had the idea to test how much human genetic variation could be attributed to "racial" groupings. He famously assembled genetic data from around the globe and calculated how much variation was statistically apportioned within versus among races. Lewontin found that only about 6 percent of genetic variation in humans could be statistically attributed to race categorizations. Lewontin showed that the social category of race explains very little of the genetic diversity among us.

Furthermore, recent studies reveal that the variation between any two individuals is very small, on the order of one single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), or single letter change in our DNA, per 1,000. That means that racial categorization could, at most, relate to 6 percent of the variation found in 1 in 1,000 SNPs. Put simply, race fails to explain much.

In addition, genetic variation can be greater within groups that societies lump together as one "race" than it is between "races." To understand how that can be true, first imagine six individuals: two each from the continents of Africa, Asia, and Europe. Again, all of these individuals will be remarkably the same: On average, only about 1 out of 1,000 of their DNA letters will be different. A study by Ning Yu and colleagues places the overall difference more precisely at 0.88 per 1,000.

The researchers further found that people in Africa had less in common with one another than they did with people in Asia or Europe. Let's repeat that: On average, two individuals in Africa are more genetically dissimilar from each other than either one of them is from an individual in Europe or Asia.

Homo sapiens evolved in Africa; the groups that migrated out likely did not include all of the genetic variation that built up in Africa. That's an example of what evolutionary biologists call the founder effect, where migrant populations who settle in a new region have less variation than the population where they came from.

Genetic variation across Europe and Asia, and the Americas and Australia, is essentially a subset of the genetic variation in Africa. If genetic variation were a set of Russian nesting dolls, all of the other continental dolls pretty much fit into the African doll.

What all these data show is that the variation that scientists-from Linnaeus to Coon to the contemporary osteoporosis researcher-think is "race" is actually much better explained by a population's location. Genetic variation is highly correlated to geographic distance. Ultimately, the farther apart groups of people are from one another geographically, and, secondly, the longer they have been apart, can together explain groups' genetic distinctions from one another. Compared to "race," those factors not only better describe human variation, they invoke evolutionary processes to explain variation.

Those osteoporosis doctors might argue that even though socially defined race poorly describes human variation, it still could be a useful classification tool in medicine and other endeavors. When the rubber of actual practice hits the road, is race a useful way to make approximations about human variation?

When I've lectured at medical schools, my most commonly asked question concerns sickle cell trait. Writer Sherman Alexie, a member of the Spokane-Coeur d'Alene tribes, put the question this way in a 1998 interview: "If race is not real, explain sickle cell anemia to me."

OK! Sickle cell is a genetic trait: It is the result of an SNP that changes the amino acid sequence of hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen in red blood cells. When someone carries two copies of the sickle cell variant, they will have the disease. In the United States, sickle cell disease is most prevalent in people who identify as African American, creating the impression that it is a "black" disease.

Yet scientists have known about the much more complex geographic distribution of sickle cell mutation since the 1950s. It is almost nonexistent in the Americas, most parts of Europe and Asia-and also in large swaths of Northern and Southern Africa. On the other hand, it is common in West-Central Africa and also parts of the Mediterranean, Arabian Peninsula, and India. Globally, it does not correlate with continents or socially defined races.

In one of the most widely cited papers in anthropology, American biological anthropologist Frank Livingstone helped to explain the evolution of sickle cell. He showed that places with a long history of agriculture and endemic malaria have a high prevalence of sickle cell trait (a single copy of the allele). He put this information together with experimental and clinical studies that showed how sickle cell trait helped people resist malaria, and made a compelling case for sickle cell trait being selected for in those areas. Evolution and geography, not race, explain sickle cell anemia.

What about forensic scientists: Are they good at identifying race? In the U.S., forensic anthropologists are typically employed by law enforcement agencies to help identify skeletons, including inferences about sex, age, height, and "race." The methodological gold standards for estimating race are algorithms based on a series of skull measurements, such as widest breadth and facial height. Forensic anthropologists assume these algorithms work.

The origin of the claim that forensic scientists are good at ascertaining race comes from a 1962 study of "black," "white," and "Native American" skulls, which claimed an 80-90 percent success rate. That forensic scientists are good at telling "race" from a skull is a standard trope of both the scientific literature and popular portrayals. But my analysis of four later tests showed that the correct classification of Native American skulls from other contexts and locations averaged about two incorrect for every correct identification. The results are no better than a random assignment of race.

That's because humans are not divisible into biological races. On top of that, human variation does not stand still. "Race groups" are impossible to define in any stable or universal way. It cannot be done based on biology-not by skin color, bone measurements, or genetics. It cannot be done culturally: Race groupings have changed over time and place throughout history.

Science 101: If you cannot define groups consistently, then you cannot make scientific generalizations about them.

Wherever one looks, race-as-genetics is bad science. Moreover, when society continues to chase genetic explanations, it misses the larger societal causes underlying "racial" inequalities in health, wealth, and opportunity.

To be clear, what I am saying is that human biogenetic variation is real. Let's just continue to study human genetic variation free of the utterly constraining idea of race. When researchers want to discuss genetic ancestry or biological risks experienced by people in certain locations, they can do so without conflating these human groupings with racial categories. Let's be clear that genetic variation is an amazingly complex result of evolution and mustn't ever be reduced to race.

Similarly, race is real, it just isn't genetic. It's a culturally created phenomenon. We ought to know much more about the process of assigning individuals to a race group, including the category "white." And we especially need to know more about the effects of living in a racialized world: for example, how a society's categories Race is real, it just isn't genetic. It's a culturally created phenomenon.and prejudices lead to health inequalities. Let's be clear that race is a purely sociopolitical construction with powerful consequences.

It is hard to convince people of the dangers of thinking race is based on genetic differences. Like climate change, the structure of human genetic variation isn't something we can see and touch, so it is hard to comprehend. And our culturally trained eyes play a trick on us by seeming to see race as obviously real. Race-as-genetics is even more deeply ideologically embedded than humanity's reliance on fossil fuels and consumerism. For these reasons, racial ideas will prove hard to shift, but it is possible.

Over 13,000 scientists have come together to form-and publicize-a consensus statement about the climate crisis, and that has surely moved public opinion to align with science. Geneticists and anthropologists need to do the same for race-as-genetics. The recent American Association of Physical Anthropologists' Statement on Race & Racism is a fantastic start.

In the U.S., slavery ended over 150 years ago and the Civil Rights Law of 1964 passed half a century ago, but the ideology of race-as-genetics remains. It is time to throw race-as-genetics on the scrapheap of ideas that are no longer useful.

We can start by getting my friend-and anyone else who has been denied-that long-overdue bone density test.
This article was republished on Discovermagazine.com.

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Please note that this article includes an image of human remains. A friend of mine with Central American, Southern European, and West African ancestry is lactose intolerant. Drinking milk products upsets her stomach, and so she avoids them.

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Understanding Critical Whiteness Studies: Harmful or Helpful in the Struggle for Racial Equity in the Academy?

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Understanding Critical Whiteness Studies: Harmful or Helpful in the Struggle for Racial Equity in the Academy?

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Understanding Critical Whiteness Studies: Harmful or Helpful in the Struggle for Racial Equity in the Academy?

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The UEL Research Repository preserves and disseminates open access publications, research data, and theses created by members of the University of East London. It exists as an online publication platform that offers free permanent access to anyone.

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Stereotypes and myths about race abound, but this does not make them true. Often, these are not even expressed by overt racists.

For many well-intentioned people, experience and cultural history has steered them towards views that aren't supported by human genetics. For example: the assumption that East Asian students are inherently better at maths, black people have natural rhythm, or Jews are good with money. Many of us know someone who thinks along these lines.

Dr Adam Rutherford, a geneticist and BBC presenter, says "Racism is being expressed in public more openly today than at any time I can recall, and it's our duty to contest it with facts."

Here's how to debunk five racist myths with science and facts.

MYTH 1: The DNA of white and black people is completely different

The primary pigment in human skin is melanin. It's used to protect us from the sun.

It absorbs the sun's ultra violet rays before they can destroy folate, one of the body's key vitamins.

Many genes are involved in the biochemical pathways that result in melanin production. Natural variation within these genes is the root cause of the spectrum of skin tones that humans have.

So, the biggest genetic difference within the human race is between white people and black people, right? Wrong.

Firstly, all humans share almost all the same DNA - a fact that betrays all of our recent origins from Africa.

Secondly, there is more genetic diversity on the continent of Africa than in the rest of the world put together.

Two people from different tribes in Southern Africa will be more genetically different from each other than a Sri Lankan, a Māori and a Russian.

We might categorise people as white, black or brown, but these visual variations don't accurately reflect the genetic differences - or rather similarities - between us.

MYTH 2: There is such a thing as 'racial purity'

We think of certain areas, lands or peoples as being isolated - either physically or culturally - and these boundaries as being insurmountable.

But this is neither what history, nor genetics, tell us. In fact, no nation is static.

"People have moved around the world throughout history, and had sex whenever and wherever they could," says Dr Rutherford.

Sometimes these are big moves in short times.

More often, people are largely static over a few generations - and that can feel like a geographical and cultural anchor.

"Nevertheless, every Nazi has Jewish ancestors" says Dr Rutherford, "Every white supremacist has Middle Eastern ancestors. Every racist has African, Indian, East Asian ancestors, as well as everyone else."

"Racial purity is pure fantasy. For humans, there are no pure bloods. Only mongrels enriched by the blood of multitudes," he says.

MYTH 3: 'Germany for the Germans', 'Turkey for the Turks' (and other variations)

Some people experience a lot of angst about migrants and refugees coming to their country, a phenomenon that has been experienced in many places around the world of late.

Among recent examples, the shooting rampage last month that started in a shisha bar in Hanau, Germany, was motivated by a far-right doctrine to expel or murder immigrants.

Those on the far right have long expressed anger in the form of epithets: "Germany for the Germans", "France for the French", "Turkey for the Turks" and "Italy for Italians" have all been used as anti-immigration phrases by far-right groups.

"Go back to where you came from" is an offensive phrase that resonates all over the world.

In truth, countries like Germany, France, Turkey and Italy have had immigration throughout their history. In fact, just about everywhere has.

The British Isles, for instance, have become home to migrants since they separated from the continent around 7,500 years ago.

Before the French took over in 1066, that part of the world had been invaded by Vikings, Angles, Saxons, Huns, and dozens of other smaller tribes and clans.

And even before that, the Romans ruled, which in their turn came from all over the intercontinental empire, which reached as far as sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.

Earlier still, around 4,500 years ago Britain was populated primarily by farmers, who had migrated from Europe across what was continuous terrain between the Netherlands and East Anglia.

On the basis of DNA evidence, we think they may have been olive skinned, with dark hair and brown eyes.

And before them there were hunter-gatherers, who had even darker skin.

So, when political parties or even racists say: "France for the French", or "Italy for the Italians" and talk about "indigenous" people... who do they actually mean?

MYTH 4: A genealogy test can prove someone is 100% white

Genealogy and ancestry fascinate us - and racists in particular.

Websites like Stormfront are frequented by white nationalist, white supremacist, and anti-Semitic members who forward theories for Holocaust-denial and are obsessed with population genetics.

They use mainstream genealogy tests, like those offered by Ancestry DNA, to "prove" they are 100% white or non-Jewish.

However, the logic is flawed.

DNA can tell you some interesting things about family history - and it's very useful for identifying close family like lost siblings or biological parents - but its powers are profoundly limited by fundamental biology.

Over time, descendants start to shed the DNA of their actual ancestors, and the amount that vanishes builds up over the generations to be huge..

You carry DNA from only half of your ancestors dating eleven generations back. So it is possible that you are genetically unrelated to people you are actually descended from as recently as the 18th Century.

"You are descended from multitudes, from all around the world, from people you think you know and from more you know nothing about," says Dr Rutherford, "You will have no meaningful genetic link to many of them."

5. Black people are better at running than white people

The last white man to compete in a 100m final at the Olympics was in 1980.

Since then, black athletes have dominated the modern era of sprinting. This has fuelled a commonly held belief that people of African descent have an advantage at the sport because of their genetic ancestry.

"Maybe there are probabilistic predictions one could make about ethnicity and sporting success based on genetics," says Dr Rutherford, "but they would be weak at best."

In actual fact, the genetics of sporting success are wickedly complex.

There are a myriad of factors in physiology of physicality, including the size of your heart, the efficiency with which you absorb oxygen, and muscular recovery, says Rutherford.

And these are relatively well understood phenomena which do have a genetic basis. But there are other physical traits (such as flexibility and co-ordination) which are less well understood.

On top of that, there's the psychological dimension: determination, concentration, and risk-taking, for example.

We do know that people who are good at explosive-energy sports tend to have a higher proportion of "fast-twitch" muscle cells, that process energy more quickly.

The genetics that underlie this involve a gene called ACTN3.

Studies have shown that elite athletes in power and strength sports are more likely to have copies of the R-type of ACTN3. The research indicates the gene occurs in a higher proportion of African Americans (96%) compared to white Americans (80%).

That does give a slight, population-wide advantage to African Americans to take place in explosive-energy sports - but it doesn't come anywhere close to explaining the difference between the number of African American sprinters and white competitors.

If it just came down to that gene, you might expect to see six black elite sprinters for every five white runners.

Adam says this is a simplistic analysis, but still a good example of how genetics don't align with racial stereotypes in sports.
This piece has been adapted from the BBC radio programme How to argue with a racist, and presented by Dr Adam Rutherford .

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Stereotypes and myths about race abound, but this does not make them true. Often, these are not even expressed by overt racists. For many well-intentioned people, experience and cultural history has steered them towards views that aren't supported by human genetics.

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Glossary of terms relating to race and ethnicity

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Glossary of terms relating to race and ethnicity

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Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health

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Abstract

This glossary focuses on the concepts and terminology used in the study of the health of minority ethnic and racial groups. It is hoped that it will stimulate debate on this subject so that an internationally applicable glossary may emerge.

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NEED FOR THE VARIABLES OF ETHNICITY AND RACE IN EPIDEMIOLOGY AND PUBLIC HEALTH

The concepts of ethnicity and race in health care and public health raise difficult ethical issues, which have seldom been explicitly considered. Ethnicity and race are controversial variables in epidemiology and public health, including the many branches of these disciplines, and yet they are of central interest. The fuel of epidemiology is the analysis of differences in the pattern of ill health and disease in populations. Public health policy is largely founded upon such analyses, particularly where differences are inequitable in the sense of unjust. The central epidemiological question is this: why is a disease more common in one racial or ethnic group of people than another? For example, why in comparison with the British population as a whole is diabetes so common in people who originate in India but live in Britain, and yet why is colorectal cancer relatively uncommon? Answers to these questions would help understand better the causes of disease, and bring benefit to all populations. The mysteries behind the myriad of ethnic differences are, however, not easily solved. An emphasis on disease differences, so appropriate to the analysis required in the science of epidemiology, is deeply influential in the health policy and management arena where it is sometimes inappropriate for similarities may matter more. As interest in, and the influence of, research on ethnicity and race is rising it is important that the conceptual basis of the work is sound. The forces that will stimulate more work on ethnicity, race, and health include the new genetics, the focus on health and health care inequalities, globalisation, migration, and the increase in the movement of refugees and asylum seekers.

A PROBLEM WITH BASICS: CONCEPTS AND TERMINOLOGY RELATING TO ETHNICITY AND RACE

Ethnicity and race

As implied above the concepts of ethnicity and race are being hotly debated in epidemiology. Furthermore, there is no consensus on appropriate terms for use in the scientific study of health by ethnicity and race, and published guidelines on how to use these concepts, from a number of journal, are yet to be widely adopted.

The word ethnicity derives from the Greek word ethnos, meaning a nation. Ethnicity is a multi-faceted quality that refers to the group to which people belong, and/or are perceived to belong, as a result of certain shared characteristics, including geographical and ancestral origins, but particularly cultural traditions and languages. The characteristics that define ethnicity are not fixed or easily measured, so ethnicity is imprecise and fluid. Ethnicity differs from race, nationality, religion, and migrant status, sometimes in subtle ways, but may include facets of these other concepts. It follows that investigators who wish to study ethnicity should collect data on such underlying factors, especially language, religion, country of birth, and family origins.

The measurement, or assignment, of ethnicity is problematic despite much research and debate. Presently, self definition of ethnicity is gaining favour. The problem is that the self assessment changes over time and with context, though this fluidity also has strengths. The currently favoured groupings in the UK, for example, include white, Indian, and Pakistani. Such groupings hide massive within group heterogeneity, which diminishes the value of ethnic categorisation as a means of delivering culturally appropriate health care, and in understanding the causes of ethnic variations in disease. Such broad categories may not fit with self identity of ethnic group.

The biological concept of race, whereby human populations were divided into sub-species mainly on the basis of visible physical characteristics, was dominant from the early 19th century to its decline with the defeat of the Nazis at the end of the second world war. None of the numerous racial classifications have stood the test of time, though there are echoes in current classifications. In retrospect, the biological concept of race was ill defined, poorly understood, and invalid and the science based on it needed sharper scientific criticism. The modern concept of race, particularly as utilised by many scholars in the United States, emphasises its social origins rather than its biological basis. In this perspective, race provides a way of defining, for social purposes, populations that look different and have different ancestral roots. It is evident, however, than even this social concept of race is ultimately based on physical and hence biological factors, though these are de-emphasised in social epidemiology as secondary, unimportant matters. The term race should be used with caution for its history is one of misuse and injustice. In the study of racism, however, the concept is central.

While race and ethnicity are different, they are overlapping concepts that are often used synonymously, a trend fostered by the increasing use, particularly in the United States, of the compound word race/ethnicity. This trend is unfortunate, but purposefully reflects the conceptual and practical problems of separating the two concepts, and traditions of race based analysis in the USA. In contrast, in Europe race is being abandoned in favour of ethnicity. Worldwide ethnicity is in the ascendancy. Whatever terms authors use, the underlying concepts ought to be discussed. In practice, a clear definition of what is meant by the terms ethnicity and race in publications is often lacking making it difficult to compare studies, particularly internationally. This is not surprising as race and ethnicity are complex, multidimensional concepts changing with time and therefore subject to varying interpretations. The field has, however, been weakened by inconsistent use of terms and concepts.

Categories and classifications

To put the concepts of race and ethnicity into operation we need to derive categories, as most clearly seen in national censuses. Researchers have mostly used such administrative categories for race and ethnicity, even when these are acknowledged by those developing them as having no scientific or anthropological validity. This unsatisfactory state of affairs can only be remedied if scientists become more deeply involved in the development of categories, and are not merely end users. Scientists' use of existing classifications can be interpreted as an endorsement of their validity. As a minimum, researchers should explain their understanding of the concepts of race or ethnicity and the classification they use (for example, one or a mix of ancestry, geographical origin, birthplace, language, religion, migration history, name, self identity, observation, etc).

It is easy to forget that categories are merely labels, and no more than a first step to understanding and defining a person's ethnicity or race. Such labels need to be recognised as shorthand for potentially important information. Authors should be describing the characteristics of the populations they are referring to. For example, the label "South Asian" should not be used if the population referred to is Bangladeshi. Bangladeshis are different from other South Asian populations. For example, Bangladeshi men have an extremely high prevalence of smoking, while some other South Asian groups of men (particularly Sikhs, but also Hindus) have a low prevalence, a vital fact lost by studies of smoking in "South Asians" combined. Popular terminology for ethnic minority populations (Asians, Blacks, Chinese, etc) may suffice for everyday conversation or political exchange but is too crude for research, and when used needs accurate definition.

Editors are responsible for ensuring scientific rigour and high quality writing in their journals, yet few journals or books have appropriate policies that are implemented vigorously. This article may spur the JECH to adopt a policy on this matter. Achieving conceptual and terminological accuracy remains an important and challenging goal for authors and editors alike.

Ethnicity and health research requires a consideration of concepts and terms beyond those referring to race and ethnicity, for example, culture, acculturation, migration, asylum, refugee, equity etc-but these are beyond this paper and some are covered in other glossaries in JECH.

With this background, I offer a glossary as an example, but it needs development in terms of geographical specificity, scope, and precision. The terms and definitions are an amalgam of the concepts of race and ethnicity. This glossary is an enlarged version of one I have used for some years with some success. Clearly, using the principles evident in the glossary, for example, giving primacy to self identity while acknowledging related factors such as ancestry and the link to racial classifications, additional terms for other ethnic and racial groups internationally can be added. It may be that contributions from JECH readers will lead to a deeper and longer glossary with truly international applications.

EXAMPLE OF A GLOSSARY OF TERMS RELATING TO ETHNICITY AND RACE

Asian

Strictly, this label applies to anyone originating from the Asian continent. In practice, this term is used in the United Kingdom to mean people with ancestry in the Indian subcontinent. In the United States, the term has broader meaning, but is mostly used to denote people of far Eastern origins, for example, Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos. More specific terms should be used whenever possible.

Asian Indian

A term currently used synonymously with South Asian (see below), but with the important limitation that major South Asian populations such as Pakistani and Bangladeshi may not identify with it. This term is being used in North America to distinguish the population from Native Americans, previously known as American Indians.

African

A person with African ancestral origins who self identifies, or is identified, as African, but excluding those of other ancestry, for example, European and South Asian. This term is the currently preferred description for more specific categories, as in African American, for example. (In terms of racial classifications, this population approximates to the group historically known as Negroid or similar terms.) In practice, Northern Africans from Algeria, Morocco, and such countries are excluded from this category. (See also Black.)

Afro-Caribbean/African Caribbean

A person of African ancestral origins whose family settled in the Caribbean before emigrating and who self identifies, or is identified, as Afro-Caribbean (in terms of racial classifications, this population approximates to the group known as Negroid or similar terms). (See also Black.)

Bangladeshi

A person whose ancestry lies in the Indian subcontinent who self identifies, or is identified, as Bangladeshi. (See also South Asian.) Between 1947 and 1971 the land known as Bangladesh was East Pakistan and before that India. There is no clear cut equivalent in terms of racial classifications, though historically Northern Indians have been classified as white, and some Indian tribes as aboriginal. (The racial term Malayan, coined by Blumenbach, is forgotten as purposeless.)

Black

A person with African ancestral origins, who self identifies, or is identified, as Black, African or Afro-Caribbean (see, African and Afro-Caribbean). The word is capitalised to signify its specific use in this way. In some circumstances the word Black signifies all non-white minority populations, and in this use serves political purposes. While this term was widely supported in the late 20th century there are signs that such support is diminishing.

Caucasian

An Indo-European. This is Blumenbach's 18th century term for the white race of mankind, which he derived from the people who lived in the Caucasus. This term is usually used synonymously with Caucasoid, European, or White. Alone among terms derived from traditional racial classification, Caucasian remains popular in both science and everyday language.

Chinese

A person with ancestral origins in China, who self identifies, or is identified, as Chinese. (In terms of historical racial classifications, Chinese approximate to the group known as Mongolian or Mongoloid.)

Ethnicity

The social group a person belongs to, and either identifies with or is identified with by others, as a result of a mix of cultural and other factors including language, diet, religion, ancestry, and physical features traditionally associated with race (see race). Increasingly, the concept is being used synonymously with race but the trend is pragmatic rather than scientific.

Ethnic minority group

Usually, but not always, this phrase is used to refer to a non-white population. Alternatively, it may be used to describe a specific identifiable group, for example, gypsy travellers, and less commonly, Irish in the UK. Some people consider the phrase inaccurate and prefer minority ethnic group, but the two phrases are used synonymously.

Ethnocentrism

The tendency to perceive and interpret from the standpoint of one's own culture. In epidemiology the tendency is reflected in the practice of using the White population as the norm or standard (see White).

European

European primarily means an inhabitant of Europe, or one with ancestral origins in Europe. Effectively this is used in epidemiology and public health as a synonym for White (see below). Europeans are placed in the racial classification Caucasian, more recently known as Europid (the latter has not proved popular).

General population

Everyone in the population being studied, irrespective of race or ethnicity.

Hindu

An old, now seldom used term, for Indians. A term occasionally used more or less synonymously with South Asian. In some countries such as Holland the term is used to describe the ethnicity of Surinamese of Indian subcontinent ancestry.

Hispanic

A person of Latin American descent (with some degree of Spanish or Portuguese ancestral origins), who self identifies, or is identified, as Hispanic irrespective of other racial or ethnic considerations. In the United States this term, often used interchangeably with Latino, is considered an indicator of ethnic origin.

Indian

A person whose ancestry lies in the Indian sub-continent who identifies, or is identified, as Indian (see, South Asian). (Major changes to India's geographical boundaries took place in 1947 when Pakistan was created.)

Indigenous

This term is usually used to mean a person who belongs naturally to a place in the sense of long term family origins (see Native). This term is sometimes used to identify the majority population, for example, in the United Kingdom as an alternative to the word White. In some parts of the world, for example, Australia, the word indigenous is used specifically to refer to aboriginal populations (for example, Aborigene).

Institutional racism (See racism)

Irish

A person whose ancestry lies in Ireland who self identifies or is identified, as Irish but this label is generally restricted to the White population (see, White).

Majority population

When used in race/ethnicity studies this phrase is usually used as a synonym for White or European.

Minority ethnic group

See ethnic minority group. Increasingly used as the preferred phrase and replacing ethnic minority group.

Native

Sometimes this word is used to refer to populations born, or with family origins, in a place (see indigenous). This was also a pejorative term meaning populations belonging to a non-European and imperfectly civilised or savage race, so writers need to take care.

Non-Asian/Non-Chinese, etc

This type of term is rarely defined but self evidently implies those not belonging to the group under study. This degree of non-specificity is not recommended.

Occidental

This is a very rarely used term meaning a native or inhabitant of the Occident (West), and effectively a synonym for European, but readers need to be aware of it as the antonym of Oriental.

Oriental

A term meaning a native or inhabitant of the Orient (East). This term is in occasional use in epidemiology, usually referring to Far Eastern populations. It is too general to be useful.

Pakistani

A person whose ancestry lies in the Indian subcontinent who identifies, or is identified, as Pakistani (see South Asian). Some Pakistanis may have birth or ancestral roots in the current territory of India but identify with Pakistan, a country created in 1947.

Race

By historical and common usage the group (sub-species in traditional scientific use) a person belongs to as a result of a mix of physical features such as skin colour and hair texture, which reflect ancestry and geographical origins, as identified by others or, increasingly, as self identified. The importance of social factors in the creation and perpetuation of racial categories has led to the concept broadening to include a common social and political heritage, making its use similar to ethnicity. Race and ethnicity are increasingly used as synonyms causing some confusion and leading to the hybrid terms race/ethnicity (see Ethnicity).

Racism/institutional racism

A belief that some races are superior to others, used to devise and justify individual and collective actions that create and sustain inequality among racial and ethnic groups. Individual racism is usually manifested in decisions and behaviours that disadvantage small numbers of people. Institutional racism, whereby policies and traditions, sometimes unwittingly, favour a particular racial or ethnic group, may be less obvious but may disadvantage large populations.

Racial prejudice

Negative beliefs, perceptions, or attitudes towards one or more ethnic or racial groups.

Reference/control/comparison

This refers to the standard against which a population that is being studied can be compared with to permit an analysis of similarities and differences. The concept is fundamental to epidemiology, and this terminology is preferable to non-specific ethnic or racial terms such as non-Asian, or general or even White population.

South Asian

A person whose ancestry is in the countries of the Indian sub-continent, including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka (in terms of racial classifications, most people in this group probably fit best into Caucasian or Caucasoid but this is confusing and is not recommended). This label is usually assigned, for individuals rarely identify with it. (See also Indian, Indian Asian, Asian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi.)

Western

A person or populations with ancestry in a region conventionally known as the west, effectively European countries, as distinguished from Eastern or Oriental populations.

White

The term usually used to describe people with European ancestral origins who identify, or are identified, as White (sometimes called European, or in terms of racial classifications, the group known as Caucasian or Caucasoid). The word is capitalised to highlight its specific use. The term has served to distinguish these groups from those groups with skin of other colours (black, yellow, etc), and hence derives from the concept of race but is used as an indicator of ethnicity. There are problems of poverty and excess disease in subgroups of the White population, which cannot be unearthed and tackled by using the label White.

Mixed and other race or ethnic group

This glossary omits a clear exposition on these terms, which require fresh thought. The increasing importance of the category mixed (ethnicity or race) is self evident. The increasing acceptance of sexual unions that cross ethnic and racial boundaries is adding both richness and complexity to most societies. The way to categorise people born of such unions is unclear and the current approaches are inadequate, partly because the number of potential categories is huge. Another category seen in racial classifications is "other", this permitting those not included to identify themselves, or be identified by the observer. In both instances the solution is, most probably, to offer space for free text responses for people to identify themselves. These responses, however, need to be coded, analysed, summarised, quantified, and published. Without this individually small, but collectively large, populations remain hidden when policy on ethnic diversity is made.

CONCLUSIONS

As this paper shows even basic work such as defining terms is problematic, and the challenges are compounded by the pace of social change, and scientific practice.

Ethnicity is replacing the scientifically limited and somewhat discredited term race in the scientific literature but the latter concept is necessary to study racism. The focus of work on race and ethnicity tends to be on those populations with comparatively adverse health outcomes. Clearly, it is not only non-white minority ethnic groups that are in this position. There is a case for conceptualising, categorising, and studying more the White racial and ethnic sub-groups. In a future glossary there may be far more emphasis on White ethnic groups, a trend to be welcomed.

This paper has focused on the concepts and terminology used in the study of the health of minority ethnic and racial groups. It has introduced some of the fundamental debates. There are other issues, for example, whether international understanding and agreement on these concepts and terms, is achievable, the comparative health of population sub-groups within the populations defined by current categories, and empirical demonstration that the benefits of data by ethnicity and race exceed the costs, in particular that they help improve the health status of the study populations. The box summarises some of the challenges facing epidemiology in ethnicity and health.

Purpose and context are the prime determinants of the way that race and ethnicity concepts are applied, classifications are devised and used, and data are analysed and presented. This paper has tackled this topic mainly from the perspective of epidemiology and pubic health, and from a UK context, though infused by ideas from North America and some Northern European countries. The same challenge needs to be tackled from the perspective of other purposes and other nations. Then we would have a foundation for an internationally acceptable and more comprehensive glossary. The task is enormous but if the subject is to mature it needs to be tackled. In the field of health there is a case for leadership from a partnership including the WHO, International Epidemiological Association, and an organisation such as the World Association of Medical Editors.

APPENDIX

An example of an introductory note on ethnicity used by the author in past publications, which may be adapted by other authors.

A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY RELATING TO ETHNICITY

There is no consensus on appropriate terms for the scientific study of health by ethnicity, and published guidelines are yet to be widely adopted. We have followed general conventions used in the UK and, whenever appropriate, the terminology used by the original authors. For example, in the UK the term ethnic minority group usually refers to minority populations of non-European origin and characterised by their non-white status. (We use it this way here). The term South Asian refers to populations originating from the Indian Sub-continent, effectively, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. White is the term currently used to describe people with European ancestral origins. By ethnicity we mean the group a person belongs to as a result of a mix of cultural factors including language, diet, religion, and ancestry.

Acknowledgments

I thank the editors of JECH for commissioning this paper, and four anonymous referees for their detailed, thoughtful, and critical feedback, which led to a substantial revision. This paper builds on my own and others' work, much of it listed in the bibliography. I acknowledge these debts. Professor Aziz Sheikh gave useful feedback on an earlier draft.

View Abstract

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Glossary of terms relating to ethnicity and race: for reflection and debate

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This glossary focuses on the concepts and terminology used in the study of the health of minority ethnic and racial groups. It is hoped that it will stimulate debate on this subject so that an internationally applicable glossary may emerge.

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What Systemic Racism Is and How to Overcome It

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References

Braveman, P. A., Arkin, E., Proctor, D., Kauh, T., & Holm, N. (2022). Systemic and structural 5acism: Definitions, examples, health damages, and approaches to dissmantling. Health Affairs, 41(2), 171-178.

Bunge, M. (2003). Emergence and convergence: Qualitative novelty and the unity of knowledge. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Feagin, J. (2013). Systemic racism: A theory of oppression. New York: Routledge.

Thagard, P. (2019). Mind-society: From brains to social sciences and professions New York: Oxford University Press.

Findlay, S. D., & Thagard, P. (2012). How parts make up wholes. Frontiers in Physiology, 3. doi:10.3389/fphys.2012.00455.

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What Systemic Racism Is and How to Overcome It

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References Braveman, P. A., Arkin, E., Proctor, D., Kauh, T., & Holm, N. (2022). Systemic and structural 5acism: Definitions, examples, health damages, and approaches to dissmantling. Health Affairs, 41(2), 171-178. Bunge, M. (2003). Emergence and convergence: Qualitative novelty and the unity of knowledge. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Feagin, J.

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Racism rebranded: how far-right ideology feeds off identity politics

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Racism rebranded: how far-right ideology feeds off identity politics

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Racism rebranded: how far-right ideology feeds off identity politics

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he Negro is not. Any more than the white man." So wrote Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born revolutionary and intellectual, in his 1952 masterpiece, Black Skin, White Masks. He was making an argument about the illusory character of racial categorisation. And, yet, more than 70 years after Fanon wrote those lines, they still feel unsettling, as if they are a challenge not just to racialisation but also to our identity, our very being. That they should do so exposes the deeply conflicted relationship we still possess with race.

We live in an age in which in most societies there is a moral abhorrence of racism, albeit that in most, bigotry and discrimination still disfigure the lives of many. We also live in an age saturated with identitarian thinking and obsessed with placing people into racial boxes. The more we despise racial thinking, the more we seem to cling to it.

This paradox is at the heart of my new book. Not So Black and White is a retelling of the history both of the idea of race and of the struggles to confront racism and to transcend racial categorisation, a retelling that challenges many of the ways in which we think both of race and of antiracism.

Most people assume that racism emerges when members of one race begin discriminating against members of another. In fact, the opposite is the case: intellectuals and elites began dividing the world into distinct races to explain and justify the differential treatment of certain peoples. The ancestors of today's African Americans were not enslaved because they were black. They were deemed to be racially distinct, as black people, to justify their enslavement.

We think of race today primarily in terms of skin colour. But that was not how 19th-century thinkers imagined race. It was, for them, a description of social inequality, not just of skin colour. It may be difficult to comprehend now, but 19th-century thinkers looked upon the working class as a distinct racial group in much the same way as many now view black people as racially dissimilar to white people. Only in the 20th century, as the working class was drawn into the democratic process, and as the new imperialism redrew the "colour line", did the contemporary understanding of race emerge.

A protester outside the News Corp building in New York, where Fox News broadcasts conspiracy theories about the 'Great Replacement'. Photograph: Gina M Randazzo/ZUMA Press Wire/REX/Shutterstock

Many today imagine, too, that identity politics is a new phenomenon, and one that is associated with the left. I show that its origins lie, in fact, on the reactionary right and its primary expression, long before it was called "identity politics", was in the concept of race, the belief that one's being - one's identity - determined one's moral and social place in the world.

If much of the history of race has been obscured, so, too, has much of the history of the challenge to racism. Until recently, those confronting inequality and oppression did so in the name not of particular identities but of a universalism that fuelled the great radical movements that have shaped the modern world, from anticolonial struggles to campaigns for women's suffrage.

These struggles expanded the meaning of equality and universality. There has developed in recent years an impassioned debate about the Enlightenment, which both supporters and critics present as a peculiarly European phenomenon. For the one, it is a demonstration of the greatness of Europe; for the other, a reminder that its ideals are tainted by racism and colonialism. Both miss the importance of the non-European world in shaping many of the ideas we associate with the Enlightenment. It was through the struggles of those denied equality and liberty by the elites in Europe and America that ideas of universalism were invested with meaning. It is the demise of that radical universalist tradition that has shaped the emergence of contemporary identity politics.

There have always been identitarian strands among antiracists, from 19th-century "Back to Africa" movements to Négritude in the 20th century. Only in the postwar world, however, have they come to dominate and to be seen as progressive. The reasons lie in a myriad of social and political developments, from the erosion of class politics, to the emergence of culture as the primary lens through which to understand social differences, to the growth of social pessimism, that have helped marginalise the universalist perspective.

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Kenan Malik is a writer, lecturer and Observer columnist. His previous books include The Quest for a Moral Compass and From Fatwa to Jihad, which was shortlisted for the Orwell prize.

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The embrace of identity politics by the left has ironically opened the door for the reactionary right to reclaim its original inheritance, allowing racism to be rebranded as white identity politics. We have come full circle: the politics of identity that began as reactionary claims about a racial hierarchy has been regrasped by the reactionary right in the name of cultural difference.

The following edited extract from my new book shows how the far right remade itself in the postwar world and how it has exploited the language of identity to pursue its aims. It shows, too, how mainstream conservatives have allowed far-right tropes to seep into our culture.

s reactionary organisations, which had enjoyed the limelight in the prewar years, were pushed into the shadows in the post-Holocaust world, many on the far right were forced to rethink their views of race, identity and difference. Alain de Benoist became a key figure in this rethinking, the founder of the Nouvelle Droitein France, and a philosophical mentor of the contemporary far right.

Benoist cut his political teeth within the traditional fascist milieu, most notably through the far-right opposition to Algerian independence. In the 1960s, after the French defeat in Algeria, he recognised the need to move beyond discredited arguments rooted in biological racism, and to engage in a cultural war to reclaim intellectual ground. In 1968, Benoist helped found GRECE, the Research and Study Group for European Civilisation, a thinktank to school the far right.

The Nouvelle Droitedrew in part from traditional themes and sources. It proclaimed its hostility to the Enlightenment, modernity, equality, democracy and liberalism, and insisted on the importance of tradition and hierarchy. It found sustenance in the French reactionary tradition from Joseph de Maistre to Charles Maurras, and from German rightwing thinkers, especially the interwar "conservative revolutionaries", such as Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt.

It drew, too, upon a very different tradition: that of the New Left that emerged in the late 1950s. From the New Left, the French New Right borrowed arguments about the significance of culture, its hostility to globalisation, its anti-Americanism and its embrace of the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. Benoist took from Gramsci the belief that conquest of power comes only after conquest of culture. Liberalism was so entrenched that its values survived irrespective of who was in power. Anti-liberals, Benoist argued, had to fight battles not on the streets but in people's minds, at the level of ideas, and of "metapolitics". This he called the tactic of "rightwing Gramscianism".

One-third of Americans believe a secret cabal 'is trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains'

At the heart of Benoist's philosophy was the abandonment of racial superiority in favour of cultural difference, and the reworking of the relationship between community, identity and diversity. "The true wealth of the world", he insisted, "is first and foremost the diversity of its cultures and peoples." It is in being different that a people finds its meaning and identity, both of which are drawn, indeed in certain senses are inseparable, from its culture and heritage. "Different cultures provide different responses to essential questions"; hence "all attempts to unify them end up destroying them". It was a v ölkisch vision: "Everyone inherits a 'constituent community' which precedes him and which will constitute the root of his values and norms." The individual "discovers his goals rather than choosing them", and builds his identity through that discovery. So, "to find out who I am, I first have to know where I am".

Such "ethnopluralism" seemed not to possess the taint of biological racism; but by fixing cultures to specific geographic locations and by insisting that to belong to a culture one had to be descended from the original inhabitants of that location, the Nouvelle Droitefound in "culture" the synonym for "race"; a find later borrowed by many conservatives and "postliberals".

Immigrants, Benoist insisted, must always remain outsiders because they were carriers of distinct cultures and histories, and so could never be absorbed into those of the host nation. Citizenship should be reserved for those who are "one of us". Immigrants could - or, at least, should - never be citizens. Democracy only works where "demos and ethnos coincide".

e are Generation Identity... We have stopped believing that Khader is our brother, the planet our village and humanity our family. We have discovered that we have roots and ancestors - and thus a future. Our only inheritance is our blood, our soil, and our identity... This is not a mere manifesto, it's a declaration of war."

It was a declaration of war on a YouTube video. But for all its comically dramatic music and overheated rhetoric, the launch in 2012 of Génération Identitaire, or Generation Identity, marked an important point in the development of modern reactionary identitarianism. Ten years earlier, a group of French far-right activists, many linked to the Nouvelle Droite, had formed the Bloc Identitaire, which became the heart of a network of far-right identitarian groups and of which Génération Identitaire was the youth wing. The movement was banned by the French government in March 2021 for "incitement of discrimination, hatred and violence". By then it had spawned a dozen other groups across Europe, and its influence had crossed the Atlantic, too.

The Bloc Identitaire drew on the Nouvelle Droite for both individuals and themes. Its key leitmotifs are familiar: opposition to globalisation, defence of ethnopluralism and white identity, hostility to immigration and Islam. The Identitarians feared that demographic change would sweep away white Europeans. "The cradle", writes Adriano Scianca, a leading figure in the Italian identitarian movement, is "the most powerful weapon" and when "the baby cots are empty, civilisation dies", an echo of future US president Theodore Roosevelt's claim at the end of the 19th century that "competition between the races" reduced itself "to the warfare of the cradle". For late-19th-century white supremacists, the declining birth rate of Anglo-Saxons created the alarming possibility of the only "true white race" in America being overrun by "the immigrant European horde". A century later, the fear is of Europeans being swamped by hordes from beyond the continent - and in particular by Islam.

Donald Trump's former chief strategist and alt-right identitarian Steve Bannon. Photograph: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images

Gisèle Littman, an Egyptian-born Jewish woman who wrote under the name of Bat Ye'or (Hebrew for "Daughter of the Nile"), coined the term "Eurabia". It described a grand conspiracy theory in which the EU, led by French elites, implemented a secret plan to sell Europe to Muslims in exchange for oil. Europe, Ye'or told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, "will become a political satellite of the Arab and Muslim world". Europeans would be reduced to the condition of "dhimmitude" - the permanent status of second-class subjects of Islamic rule. The Israeli historian Robert Wistrich dismissed Ye'or's fantasies as "the protocols of the elders of Brussels". In the wake of 9/11, however, the fantasies took flight, and not just on the fringes of politics. The mainstream British writer Melanie Phillips has become an advocate of the "dhimmitude" thesis, as have influential figures such as Niall Ferguson and Bruce Bawer in the US.

Generation Identity is no mass movement; membership of its various groups is tiny. Nevertheless, it has helped shape public debate, promoting an aggressive form of reactionary identitarianism that has percolated far beyond the far right. "Europe is committing suicide... by the end of the lifespans of most people currently alive, Europe will not be Europe and the peoples of Europe will have lost the only place in the world we had to call home." That could be Alain de Benoist or Guillaume Faye or any number of Nouvelle Droiteor Génération Identitaire polemicists. In fact, it is Douglas Murray, in the opening to his 2017 bestseller The Strange Death of Europe. Murray is a leading figure in British conservative circles, associate editor of the Spectator magazine and author of a string of popular books. He writes of "the replacement of large parts of the European populations by other people" and worries that "London has become a foreign country" because "in 23 of London's 33 boroughs 'white Britons' are now in a minority", again echoing Generation Identity.

The main themes in Murray's argument were steeped in traditional racial thinking. The term "race suicide" was coined in the late 19th century by the American sociologist Edward Ross, and popularised by Theodore Roosevelt, to express their fears that Anglo-Saxons were being out-bred by inferior immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. The white supremacist Theodore Lothrop Stoddard warned in the early 20th century that the white ancestral "homeland" of the Caucasus had become a "racially brown man's land in which white blood survives only as vestigial traces of vanishing significance". The same was happening in Europe, too. "What assurance", he wondered, could there be "that the present world order may not swiftly and utterly pass away?" These ideas were for much of the postwar era pushed to the racist fringes. Sustained by the Nouvelle Droiteand Génération Identitaire, these fringe arguments have now become appropriated by many strands of mainstream conservatism.

Camus described non-Europeans as 'colonists' and the process of replacement as 'genocide by substitution'

The 2010s saw a series of books warning of Europe "committing suicide", such as Thilo Sarrazin's Germany Abolishes Itself and Éric Zemmour's The French Suicide. Sarrazin, former SPD finance minister for the state of Berlin, and executive board member of Germany's central bank, bemoaned the declining white population and the high level of immigrant fertility, the combination leading to Germany being both less intelligent, less moral and no longer Germany. For Zemmour, a television journalist who became a candidate in the 2022 presidential elections, Europe was committing "premeditated suicide", the left having "betrayed the people in the name of minorities".

The "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory, a staple of the far right, has also gained a foothold in mainstream conservatism. In 2011, the novelist and white nationalist conspiracy theorist Renaud Camus published Le Grand Remplacementin which he claimed that globalists had created the "replaceable human, without any national, ethnic or cultural specificity", allowing "the replacing elites" to swap white Europeans for non-Europeans. He described non-Europeans in Europe as "colonists", the "replacing elites" as "collaborationists", and the process of replacement as "genocide by substitution". Camus dedicated his book to the two "prophets" that had shaped his thinking, the British anti-immigration politician Enoch Powell and the French writer Jean Raspail, whose 1973 dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints tells of a fleet of immigrants from India overwhelming France, and its white population, and has become a cult hit for identitarians across the globe.

Writer Lionel Shriver, who fears the de-whitening of London. Photograph: Phil Fisk/The Observer

In Britain, too, similar fears have become part of the conservative conversation. Like Douglas Murray, the London-based American novelist Lionel Shriver fears the de-whitening of London and projects her version of replacement theory. "The lineages of white Britons in their homeland commonly go back hundreds of years," she writes, and yet they have to "submissively accept" the "ethnic transformation" of the UK "without a peep of protest". Westerners, she adds, are being forced "to passively accept and even abet incursions by foreigners so massive that the native-born are effectively surrendering their territory without a shot fired". The distinguished economist Paul Collier is another figure apprehensive about "the indigenous British" becoming "a minority in their own capital". Political scientist Eric Kaufmann thinks it legitimate to promote white "racial self-interest" and to use such racial self-interest to limit immigration, so that in a majority white country, immigrants should be mainly white to enable "assimilation".

dentitarian arguments have become even more entrenched on the other side of the Atlantic, from the far right to mainstream Republicanism. The white nationalist and neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, who claims to have invented the term "alt-right", replays many of the themes of reactionary identitarianism: white people as victims of cultural "dispossession", immigration as a "proxy war" against white people. He advocates "peaceful ethnic cleansing" and the creationof "an ethno-state that would be a gathering point of all Europeans", one "based on very different ideals than... the Declaration of Independence".

The presidential victory of Donald Trump in 2016 provided new opportunities, as alt-right identitarians such Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon entered the White House. Even before the Trump ascendancy, conservatives were humming to many of the European refrains. In the question at the heart of Christopher Caldwell's 2009 book, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe - "Can Europe be the same with different people in it?" - is embedded the idea that Europe was made by a particular group of people and that immigrants - different people - would undo it. He echoes, too, the claim that migration is a form of "colonisation" and that migrants come to "supplant" European culture. Caldwell hails Raspail's The Camp of the Saints as capturing "the complexity of the modern world".

After 2016, the Great Replacement theory became commonplace in Republican circles. "We can't restore our civilisation with somebody else's babies", Iowa congressman Steve King tweeted. Fox News' Tucker Carlson has constantly charged the Democrats with trying "to change the racial mix of the country... a policy [that] is called 'the great replacement', the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from faraway countries". Polls show that one-third of Americans and nearly two-thirds of Trump supporters believe in the Great Replacement theory and that a secret cabal "is trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains".

One of the ironies is that many of the conservatives who fret most about "white decline" are also among the most strident critics of identity politics. According to Douglas Murray, identity politics "atomises society into different interest groups", and its "consequences... are deranged as well as dementing". But not, apparently, when worrying that "Only 44.9% of London residents are now white British" or that Europeans are being driven out of their homeland. Taking part in a debate in defence of the proposition that "identity politics is tearing society apart", Lionel Shriver argued that she had been a "fierce advocate" of the US civil rights movement because its goal was "to break down the artificial barriers between us" and "to release us into seeing each other not as black or white... but as individual people". "The colour of my skin," she added, "is an arbitrary accident" and "the boxes into which I have been born are confinements I have struggled to get out of and I would wish that liberation to everyone else." Except, it seems, if you are a non-white immigrant. Then, the "arbitrary accident" of birth becomes an essential feature of one's identity, the "artificial barriers between us" need to be recognised as insurmountable impediments to assimilation, the "confinements" of ethnic boxes maintained and people seen not as "individuals" but as "black or white".

The reactionary right -Nouvelle Droite, Generation Identity, the alt-right in America - uses the language of diversity and identity as a means of rebranding racism. Many on the mainstream right rehearse elements of this rebranding, even as they castigate the excesses of white nationalism. Murray "unequivocally" condemns the "racism exhibited by people pursuing white ethno-nationalism" while also giving a nod to the Great Replacement theory and to the importance of whiteness. It is occupying the grey zone in which one can claim attachment to the moral framework of postwar antiracism but also maintain the freedom to replay perniciously racist arguments, helping to normalise them.

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Racism rebranded: how far-right ideology feeds off identity politics

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he Negro is not. Any more than the white man." So wrote Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born revolutionary and intellectual, in his 1952 masterpiece, Black Skin , White Masks . He was making an argument about the illusory character of racial categorisation.

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The invention of whiteness: the long history of a dangerous idea

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In 2008, a satirical blog called Stuff White People Like became a brief but boisterous sensation. The conceit was straightforward, coupling a list, eventually 136 items long, of stuff that white people liked to do or own, with faux-ethnographic descriptions that explained each item's purported racial appeal. While some of the items were a little too obvious - indie music appeared at #41, Wes Anderson movies at #10 - others, including "awareness" (#18) and "children's games as adults" (#102), were inspired. It was an instant hit. In its first two months alone, Stuff White People Like drew 4 million visitors, and it wasn't long before a book based on the blog became a New York Times bestseller.

The founder of the blog was an aspiring comedian and PhD dropout named Christian Lander, who'd been working as an advertising copywriter in Los Angeles when he launched the site on a whim. In interviews, Lander always acknowledged that his satire had at least as much to do with class as it did with race. His targets, he said, were affluent overeducated urbanites like himself. Yet there's little doubt that the popularity of the blog, which depended for its humour on the assumption that whiteness was a contentless default identity, had much to do with its frank invocation of race. "As a white person, you're just desperate to find something else to grab on to," Lander said in 2009. "Pretty much every white person I grew up with wished they'd grown up in, you know, an ethnic home that gave them a second language."

Looking back at Stuff White People Like today, what marks the site's age is neither the particularities of its irony nor the broad generalities of its targets. There are still plenty of white people with too much time and too much disposable income on their hands, and plenty of them still like yoga (#15), Vespa scooters (#126), and "black music that black people don't listen to any more" (#116).

What has changed, however - changed in ways that date Stuff White People Like unmistakably - is the cultural backdrop. Ten years ago, whiteness suffused mainstream culture like a fog: though pervasive to the point of omnipresence, it was almost nowhere distinct. When the sorts of white people for and about whom Lander was writing talked about being white, their conversations tended to span the narrow range between defensiveness and awkwardness. If they weren't exactly clamouring to dispense with their racial identity, and the privileges that came with it, they were also not eager to embrace, or even discuss it, in public.

In the years since, especially among the sort of people who might have once counted themselves fans of Lander's blog, the public significance of whiteness has undergone an almost wholesale re-evaluation. Far from being a punchline for an anxious, cathartic joke, whiteness is now earnestly invoked, like neoliberalism or populism, as a central driver of cultural and political affairs. Whereas Lander could score a bestseller in 2008 with a book mocking whiteness as a bland cultural melange whose greatest sin was to be uninteresting, just nine years later Ta-Nehisi Coates would have his own bestseller that described whiteness as "an existential danger to the country and the world".

Much of the change, of course, had to do with Donald Trump, for whom, as Coates put it, "whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic, but is the very core of his power". But it was not only Trump. Whiteness has been implicated in events on both sides of the Atlantic, including Brexit; mass shootings in Norway, New Zealand and the US; the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor killings; and the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol. Alongside these real-world incidents, a bumper crop of scholarship, journalism, art and literature - by Coates, Nell Irvin Painter, Jordan Peele, Eric Foner, Ava DuVernay, Adam Serwer, Barbara and Karen Fields, Kevin Young, David Olusoga, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Colson Whitehead and Claudia Rankine, among many others - has spurred the most significant reconsideration of racial whiteness in 50 years.

This reckoning, as it is sometimes called, has had measurable effects. In a Pew poll last October, nearly a third of white Americans said that the recent attention to racial issues signified a "major change" in American attitudes about race - another 45% said it was a "minor change" - and nearly half believed that those changes would lead to policies that would ameliorate racial inequality. In the UK, a YouGov poll from December suggested that more than a third of Britons reported that they were having more discussions about racism than they had previously.

At the same time, this new focus on whiteness has prompted much confusion and consternation, especially among white people not used to thinking of themselves in racial terms. The Pew poll found that half of white Americans thought there was "too much" discussion of racial issues, and a similar proportion suggested that seeing racism where it didn't exist was a bigger problem than not seeing racism where it did.

What these recent debates have demonstrated more than anything, perhaps, is how little agreement still exists about what whiteness is and what it ought to be. Nearly everywhere in contemporary society "white" is presumed to be a meaningful index of identity that, like age and gender, is important enough to get mentioned in news accounts, tallied in political polls, and recorded in government databases. Yet what that identity is supposed to tell us is still substantially in dispute. In many ways, whiteness resembles time as seen by Saint Augustine: we presume we understand it as long as we're not asked to explain it, but it becomes inexplicable as soon as we're put to the test.

A little more than a century ago, in his essay The Souls of White Folk, the sociologist and social critic WEB Du Bois proposed what still ranks as one of the most penetrating and durable insights about the racial identity we call white: "The discovery of personal whiteness among the world's peoples is a very modern thing - a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed."

Though radical in its time, Du Bois's characterisation of what he called the "new religion of whiteness" - a religion founded on the dogma that "of all the hues of God, whiteness alone is inherently and obviously better than brownness and tan" - would have a profound effect on the way historians and other scholars would come to understand racial identity. In part this had to do with his insistence that a racial category like whiteness was more akin to a religious belief than a biological fact. Du Bois rejected the idea, still common in his day, that the races reflected natural divisions within the human species - as well as the nearly inevitable corollary that the physical, mental and behavioural traits associated with the white race just happened to be the ones most prized by modern societies.

That had been the view, for instance, of Thomas Jefferson, who had attemptedto delineate "the real distinctions which nature has made" between the races, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, first published in 1781. It was also the view that would appear, at least in attenuated form, two centuries later in Charles Murray and Richard J Herrnstein's Bell Curve, which was published in 1994. Murray and Herrnstein argued that "the most plausible" explanation for the differences between Black and white populations recorded on IQ tests was "some form of mixed gene and environmental source" - in other words, that at least some of the discrepancy owes to natural differences.

By the time The Bell Curveappeared, Du Bois's assertion that racial categories were not biologically grounded was widely accepted. In the years since, the scientific evidence for that understanding has only become more overwhelming. A 2017 study examined the DNA of nearly 6,000 people from around the world and found that while some genetic differences among humans can be traced to various ancestral lineages - for example, eastern African, southern European or circumpolar - none of those lineages correspond to traditional ideas about race.

If it's easy enough for many people today to accept that whiteness is a purely sociological phenomenon - in some quarters, the idea that "race is a social construct" has become a cliche - the same cannot be said for Du Bois's suggestion that whiteness is a relatively new thing in human history. And yet just as in the case of genetic science, during the second half of the 20th century a number of historians demonstrated that while Du Bois was off by a few hundred years, he was correct that it was only in the modern period that people started to think of themselves as belonging to something called the white race.

Of course, it's important not to overstate the case: the evolution of the idea of whiteness was messy and often indistinct. As the historian Nell Irvin Painter has cautioned, "white identity didn't just spring to life full-blown and unchanging". It had important antecedents that included a growing sense of a pan-European identity; longstanding cultural associations that saw white as a symbol of purity and virtue; and bog-standard ethnocentrism.

Still, with only slightly exaggerated precision, we can say that one of the most crucial developments in "the discovery of personal whiteness" took place during the second half of the 17th century, on the peripheries of the still-young British empire. What's more, historians such as Oscar and Mary Handlin, Edmund Morgan and Edward Rugemer have largely confirmed Du Bois's suspicion that while xenophobia appears to be fairly universal among human groupings, the invention of a white racial identity was motivated from the start by a need to justify the enslavement of Africans. In the words of Eric Williams, a historian who later became the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, "slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery".

If you asked an Englishman in the early part of the 17th century what colour skin he had, he might very well have called it white. But the whiteness of his skin would have suggested no more suitable basis for a collective identity than the roundness of his nose or the baldness of his head. If you asked him to situate himself within the rapidly expanding borders of the known world, he would probably identify himself, first and most naturally, as an Englishman. If that category proved too narrow - if, say, he needed to describe what it was he had in common with the French and the Dutch that he did not share with Ottomans or Africans - he would almost certainly call himself a Christian instead.

That religious identity was crucial for the development of the English slave trade - and eventually for the development of racial whiteness. In the early 17th century, plantation owners in the West Indies and in the American colonies largely depended on the labour of European indentured servants. These servants were considered chattel and were often treated brutally - the conditions on Barbados, England's wealthiest colony, were notorious - but they were fortunate in at least one respect: because they were Christian, by law they could not be held in lifetime captivity unless they were criminals or prisoners of war.

Africans enjoyed no such privilege. They were understood to be infidels, and thus the "perpetual enemies" of Christian nations, which made it legal to hold them as slaves. By 1640 or so, the rough treatment of indentured servants had started to diminish the supply of Europeans willing to work on the sugar and tobacco plantations, and so the colonists looked increasingly to slavery, and the Atlantic-sized loophole that enabled it, to keep their fantastically profitable operations supplied with labour.

The plantation owners understood very well that their cruel treatment of indentured Europeans, and their even crueller treatment of enslaved Africans, might lead to thoughts - or worse - of vengeance. Significantly outnumbered, they lived in constant fear of uprisings. They were particularly afraid of incidents such as Bacon's Rebellion, in 1676, which saw indentured Europeans fighting side-by-side with free and enslaved Africans against Virginia's colonial government.

To ward off such events, the plantation owners initially sought to protect themselves by giving their "Christian" servants legal privileges not available to their enslaved "Negroes". The idea was to buy off the allegiance of indentured Europeans with a set of entitlements that, however meagre, set them above enslaved Africans. Toward the end of the 17th century, this scheme witnessed a significant shift: many of the laws that regulated slave and servant behaviour - the 1681 Servant Act in Jamaica, for example, which was later copied for use in South Carolina - began to describe the privileged class as "whites" and not as "Christians".

One of the more plausible explanations for this change, made by Rugemer and the historian Katharine Gerbner, among others, is that the establishment of whiteness as a legal category solved a religious dilemma. By the 1670s, Christian missionaries, including the Quaker George Fox, were insisting that enslaved Africans should be inducted into the Christian faith. The problem this posed for the planters was obvious: if their African labourers became Christians, and no longer "perpetual enemies" of Christendom, then on what legal grounds could they be enslaved? And what about the colonial laws that gave special privileges to Christians, laws whose authors apparently never contemplated the possibility that Africans might someday join the faith?

The planters tried to resolve the former dilemma by blocking the conversion of enslaved Africans, on the grounds, as the Barbados Assembly put it in 1680, that such conversion would "endanger the island, inasmuch as converted negroes grow more perverse and intractable than others". When that didn't work (the Bishop of London objected) they instead passed laws guaranteeing that baptism could not be invoked as grounds for seeking freedom.

But the latter question, about privileges for Christians, required the colonialists to think in a new way. No longer could their religious identity separate them and their servants from enslaved Africans. Henceforth they would need what Morgan called "a screen of racial contempt". Henceforth, they would need to start thinking of themselves as white.

As late as 1694, a slave-ship captain could still question the racial logic newly employed to justify his trade. ("I can't think there is any intrinsick value in one colour more than another, nor that white is better than black, only we think it so because we are so," Thomas Phillips wrote in his diary.) But whiteness quickly proved itself a powerful weapon that allowed transatlantic capitalism to secure the labour - "white" and African - it needed. As the historian Theodore Allen put it, "The plantation bourgeoisie deliberately extended a privileged status to the white poor of all categories as a means of turning to African slavery as the basis of its system of production."

The economic utility of the idea of whiteness helped spread it rapidly around the world. Du Bois was not wrong to call it a religion, for like a religion, it operated at every psychological, sociological and political scale, from the most intimate to the most public. Like a religion, too, it adapted to local conditions. What it meant to be white in British Virginia was not identical to what it would mean in New York before the American civil war, in India during the Raj, in Georgia during Jim Crow, in Australia after Federation, or in Germany during the Third Reich. But what united all these expressions was a singular idea: that some group of people called white was naturally superior to all others. As Benjamin Disraeli, the Victorian prime minister and one of the most committed race ideologists of his time, put it, "race implies difference, difference implies superiority, and superiority leads to predominance".

The idea of whiteness, in other words, was identical to the idea of white supremacy. For the three centuries that preceded the civil rights movement, this presumption was accepted at the most refined levels of culture, by people who, in other contexts, were among the most vocal advocates of human liberty and equality. It is well known that Immanuel Kant argued we should treat every other person "always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means". Less well known is his proposal, in his Lectures on Physical Geography,published in 1802, that "humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites", or his claim, in his notes for his Lectures on Anthropology, that native "Americans and Negroes cannot govern themselves. Thus, serve only as slaves". Even Gandhi, during the early part of his life, accepted the basic lie of whiteness, arguing that "the English and the Indians spring from a common stock, called the Indo-Aryan" and that "the white race in South Africa should be the predominating race".

As though aware of their own guilty conscience, the evangelists of the religion of whiteness were always desperate to prove that it was something other than mere prejudice. Where the Bible still held sway, they bent the story of Noah's son Ham into a divine apologia for white supremacy. When anatomy and anthropology gained prestige in the 18th and 19th centuries, they cited pseudo-scientific markers of racial difference like the cephalic index and the norma verticalis. When psychology took over in the 20th, they told themselves flattering stories about divergences in IQ.

For all their evident success, the devotees of the religion of whiteness were never able to achieve the total vision they longed for. In part, this was because there were always dissenters, including among those who stood to gain from it, who rejected the creed of racial superiority. Alongside those remembered by history - Elizabeth Freeman, Toussaint Louverture, Harriet Tubman, Sitting Bull, Franz Boas, Haviva Reik, Martin Luther King Jr, Nelson Mandela - there were millions of now-forgotten people who used whatever means they possessed to resist it. In part, too, the nonsense logic that regulated the boundaries of whiteness - the one-drop rule in the US, which said that anyone with Black ancestry could not be white; the endless arguments over what "caucasian" was supposed to mean; the "honorary Aryan" status that Hitler extended to the Japanese - was no match for the robust complexities of human society.

Yet if the religion of whiteness was never able to gain acceptance as an unchallengeable scientific fact, it was still hugely successful at shaping social reality. Some of this success had to do with its flexibility. Thanks to its role in facilitating slavery, whiteness in the US was often defined in opposition to blackness, but between those two extremes was room for tactical accommodations. In 1751, Benjamin Franklin could claim that only the English and Saxons "make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth", and nearly 80 years later, Ralph Waldo Emerson would insist that the Irish, like the Chinese and the Native American, were not caucasian. Over time, however, the definition of who counted as culturally white expanded to include Catholics from southern Europe, the Irish and even Jews, who for centuries had been seen as quintessential outsiders.

The religion of whiteness also found success by persuading its adherents that they, and not the people they oppressed, were the real victims. In 1692, colonial legislators in British Barbados complained that "sundry of the Negroes and Slaves of this island, have been long preparing, contriving, conspiring and designing a most horrid, bloody, damnable and detestable rebellion, massacre, assassination and destruction". From there, it was a more or less straight line to Woodrow Wilson's claim, in 1903, that the southerners who started the Ku Klux Klan were "aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation", and to Donald Trump's warning, when he launched his presidential campaign in 2015, that Mexican immigrants to the US were "bringing drugs. And they're bringing crime. And they're rapists."

Where the religion of whiteness was not able to win converts with persuasion or fear, it deployed cruder measures to secure its power, conscripting laws, institutions, customs and churches to enforce its prerogatives. Above all, it depended on force. By the middle of the 20th century, the presumption that a race of people called white were superior to all others had supplied the central justification not just for the transatlantic slave trade but also for the near-total extinction of Indians in North America; for Belgian atrocities in Congo; for the bloody colonisation of India, east Africa and Australia by Britain; for the equally bloody colonisation of north and west Africa and south-east Asia by France; for the deployment of the Final Solution in Nazi Germany; and for the apartheid state in South Africa. And those are merely the most extreme examples. Alongside those murdered, raped and enslaved in the name of whiteness, the total number of whom runs at least to nine figures, are an almost unthinkable number of people whose lives were shortened, constrained, antagonised and insulted on a daily basis.

It was not until the aftermath of the second world war that frank endorsements of white supremacy were broadly rejected in Anglo-American public discourse. That this happened at all was thanks largely to the efforts of civil rights and anti-colonial activists, but the war itself also played a role. Though the horrors of the Nazi regime had been more acute in their intensity than anything happening at the time in the US or the UK, they supplied an unflattering mirror that made it impossible to ignore the racism that was still prevalent in both countries. (A New York Times editorial in 1946 made the connection explicit, arguing that "this is a particularly good year to campaign against the evils of bigotry, prejudice and race hatred because we have recently witnessed the defeat of enemies who tried to found a mastery of the world upon such a cruel and fallacious policy".)

Political appeals to white solidarity diminished slowly but certainly. In 1955, for example, Winston Churchill could still imagine that "Keep England White" was a winning general-election theme, and even as late as 1964, Peter Griffiths, a Conservative candidate for parliament, would score a surprise victory after endorsing a nakedly racist slogan. By 1968, however, when Enoch Powell delivered his "Rivers of Blood" speech - in which he approvingly quoted a constituent who lamented that "in 15 or 20 years' time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man" - he would be greeted by outrage in the Times, which called it an "evil speech", and expelled from the Conservative shadow cabinet. In the US, too, where a century of racial apartheid had followed a century of slavery, open expressions of racism met with increasing public censure. Throughout the 60s and into the 70s, Congress passed a series of statutes that rendered explicit racial discrimination illegal in many areas of public life.

This gradual rejection of explicit, government-enforced white supremacy was hugely consequential in terms of public policy. Yet it did not mean that whiteness, as a political force, had lost its appeal: in the weeks after Powell's speech, to take just one example, a Gallup poll found that 74% of Britons supported his suggestion that brown-skinned immigrants ought to be repatriated. It also left unresolved the more difficult question of whether whiteness was truly separable from its long history of domination.

Instead of looking too hard at the sordid history of whiteness, many white people found it easier to decide that the civil rights movement had accomplished all the anti-racism work that needed doing. The result was a strange détente. On the one hand, whiteness retreated as a subject of public attention, giving way to a new rhetoric of racial colour-blindness. On the other hand, vast embedded economic and cultural discrepancies allowed white people to continue to exercise the institutional and structural power that had accumulated on their behalf across the previous three centuries.

Similarly, while blatant assertions of white power - such as the 1991 gubernatorial campaign of David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, in Louisiana - met with significant elite resistance, what counted as racist (and therefore subject to the taboo) was limited to only the most flagrant instances of racial animus. Among liberals and conservatives, racism was widely understood as a species of hatred, which meant that any white person who could look into his heart and find an absence of open hostility could absolve himself of racism.

Even the phrase "white supremacy", which predates the word "racism" in English by 80 years and once described a system of interlocking racial privileges that touched every aspect of life, was redefined to mean something rare and extreme. In 1923, for example, under the headline White Supremacy Menaced, the New York Times would print an article which took at face value a Harvard professor's warning that "one of the gravest and most acute problems before the world today" was "the problem of saving the white race from submergence in the darker races". In 1967, the US supreme court invalidated a law that prevented whites from marrying people who were not white, on the grounds that it was "obviously an endorsement of the doctrine of White Supremacy", and two years later, the critic Albert Murray would use the phrase to describe everything from anti-Black prejudice in police departments to bigoted media representations of Black life to influential academic studies such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan's The Negro Family.

By the 80s and 90s, however, at least in white-dominated media, "white supremacy" was reserved only for the most shocking and retrograde examples of racism. For many people who grew up at that time, as I did, the phrase evoked cross burnings and racist hooligans, rather than an intricate web of laws and norms that maintained disparities of wealth, education, housing, incarceration and access to political power.

Perhaps most perverse of all was the charge of "reverse racism", which emboldened critics of affirmative action and other "race-conscious" policies to claim that they, and not the policies' proponents, were the true heralds of racial equality. In 1986, Ronald Reagan went so far as to defend his opposition to minority-hiring quotas by invoking Martin Luther King Jr: "We want a colour-blind society," Reagan declared. "A society, that in the words of Dr King, judges people not by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character."

Of course not everyone accepted this new dispensation, which scholars have variously described as "structural racism", "symbolic racism" or "racism without racists". In the decades following the civil rights movement, intellectuals and activists of colour continued to develop the Du Boisian intellectual tradition that understood whiteness as an implement of social domination. In the 80s and 90s, a group of legal scholars that included Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Cheryl Harris and Richard Delgado produced a body of research that became known as critical race theory, which was, in Bell's words, "ideologically committed to the struggle against racism, particularly as institutionalised in and by law".

Alongside critical race theory, and in many ways derived from it, a new academic trend, known as whiteness studies, took shape. Historians working in this subfield demonstrated the myriad ways in which the pursuit of white supremacy - like the pursuit of wealth and the subjection of women - had been one of the central forces that gave shape to Anglo-American history. For many of them, the bill of indictment against whiteness was total: as the historian David Roediger put it, "it is not merely that whiteness is oppressive and false; it is that whiteness is nothing but oppressive and false."

In the fall of 1992, a new journal co-founded by Noel Ignatiev, one of the major figures in whiteness studies, appeared in bookstores around Cambridge, Massachusetts. Called Race Traitor, the magazine wore its motto and guiding ethos on its cover: Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity. The issue opened with an editorial whose headline was equally provocative: "Abolish the white race - by any means necessary." This demand, with its echoes of Sartre by way of Malcolm X, was not, as it turned out, a call for violence, much less for genocide. As Ignatiev and his co-editor, John Garvey, explained, they took as their foundational premise that "the white race is a historically constructed social formation", a sort of club whose membership "consists of those who partake of the privileges of the white skin in this society".

For Ignatiev and Garvey, whiteness had been identified with white supremacy for so long that it was folly to think it was salvageable. "So long as the white race exists," they wrote, "all movements against racism are doomed to fail." What was necessary, in their view, was for the people called "white" - people like them - to forcefully reject that identification and the racial privileges that came with it. Whiteness, they suggested, was a fragile, unstable thing, such that even a small number of determined attacks - objecting to racist educational programmes at a school board meeting, say, or capturing racist police behaviour on video - ought to be able to unsettle the whole edifice.

But while whiteness studies produced much work that still makes for bracing, illuminating reading, it was soon mocked as one more instance of the very privilege it meant to oppose. "The whole enterprise gives whites a kind of standing in the multicultural paradigm they have never before enjoyed," Margaret Talbot wrote in the New York Times in 1997. "And it involves them, inevitably, in a journey of self-discovery in which white people's thoughts about their own whiteness acquire a portentous new legitimacy." Even Ignatiev would later say he "wanted nothing to do with" it.

By the mid-2000s, the "colour-blind" ideological system had become so successful that it managed to shield even the more obvious operations of whiteness - the overwhelming numbers of white people in corporate boardrooms, for instance, or in the media and tech industries - from much censure. In the US, when racial disparities could not be ignored, it was often suggested that time was the only reliable remedy: as the numerical proportion of whites dwindled, so too would their political and economic power diminish. (Never mind that whiteness had managed to escape predictions of demographic doom before, by integrating groups it had previously kept on its margins.)

Meanwhile, younger white liberals, the sort of people who might have read Bell or Crenshaw or Ignatiev at university, tended to duck the subject of their own racial identity with a shuffling awkwardness. Growing up white in the decades after the civil rights movement was a little like having a rich but disreputable cousin: you never knew quite what to make of him, or the extravagant gifts he bought for your birthday, and so you found it easier, in general, just not to say anything.

The absence of talk about whiteness was so pervasive that it became possible to convince yourself that it constituted one of the central obstacles to racial progress. When I was in graduate school during the early 00s, toward the end of the whiteness-studies boomlet, I often heard - including from my own mouth - the argument that the real problem was that white people weren't talking enough about their racial identity. If you could get people to acknowledge their whiteness, we told ourselves, then it might be possible to get them to acknowledge the unfair ways in which whiteness had helped them.

The trouble with this notion would become clear soon enough, when the presidency of Barack Obama offered the surest test to date of the proposition that whiteness had separated itself from its supremacist past. Though Obama's election was initially hailed by some as proof that the US was entering a new post-racial phase, it took just a few months for the Tea party, a conservative movement ostensibly in favour of small government, to suggest that the opposite was closer to the truth.

In September 2009, Jimmy Carter caused a stir by suggesting that the Tea party's opposition was something other than a principled reaction to government spending. "I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man," Carter said. (Carter's speculation was later backed up by research: the political scientist Ashley Jardina, for instance, found that "more racially resentful whites are far more likely to say they support the Tea party and rate it more positively.")

The white backlash to Obama's presidency continued throughout his two terms, helped along by Rupert Murdoch's media empire and the Republican party, which won majorities in both houses of Congress by promising to obstruct anything Obama tried to accomplish. Neither project kept Obama from a second term, but this does not mean that they were without effect: though Obama lost white voters by 12% in 2008, four years later he would lose them by 20%, the worst showing among white voters for a successful candidate in US history.

At the same time, Obama's victory suggested to some observers the vindication of the demographic argument: the changing racial composition of the US appeared to have successfully neutralised the preferences of the white electorate, at least as far as the presidency was concerned. ("There just are not enough middle-aged white guys that we can scrape together to win," said one Republican after Obama's victory.)

What's more, the first wave of Black Lives Matter protests, which attracted international attention in the summer of 2014, prompted a torrent of demonstrative introspection among white people, especially online. As the critic Hua Hsu would write, half-teasingly, in 2015, "it feels as though we are living in the moment when white people, on a generational scale, have become self-aware".

Not for the first time, however, what was visible on Twitter was a poor indicator of deeper social trends. As we now know, the ways in which whiteness was becoming most salient at mid-decade were largely not the ways that prompted recent university graduates to announce their support for Rhodes Must Fall on Instagram. Far more momentous was the version of white identity politics that appreciated the advantages of whiteness and worried about them slipping away; that saw in immigration an existential threat; and that wanted, more than anything, to "Take Back Control" and to "Make America Great Again".

It was this version of whiteness that helped to power the twin shocks of 2016: first Brexit and then Trump. The latter, especially - not just the fact of Trump's presidency but the tone of it, the unrestrained vengeance and vituperation that animated it - put paid to any lingering questions about whether whiteness had renounced its superiority complex. Ta-Nehisi Coates, who more than any other single person had been responsible for making the bumbling stereotype of whiteness offered up by Stuff White People Like seem hopelessly myopic, understood what was happening immediately. "Trump truly is something new - the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president," Coates wrote in the autumn of 2017. "His ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power."

In 1860, a man who called himself "Ethiop" published an essay in The Anglo-African Magazine, which has been called the first Black literary journal in the US. The author behind the pseudonym was William J Wilson, a former bootmaker who later served as the principal of Brooklyn's first public school for Black children. Wilson's essay bore the headline, What Shall We Do with the White People?

The article was meant in part meant to mock the white authors and statesmen who had endlessly asked themselves a similar question about Black people in the US. But it was not only a spoof. In a tone that mimicked the smug paternalism of his targets, he laid out a comprehensive indictment of white rule in the country: the plunder and murder of the "Aborigines"; the theft and enslavement of Africans; the hypocrisy embodied by the American constitution, government and white churches. At the root of all this, he wrote, was "a long continued, extensive and almost complete system of wrongdoing" that made the men and women who enabled it into "restless, grasping" marauders. "In view of the existing state of things around us," Wilson proposed at the end, "let our constant thought be, what for the best good of all shall we do with the White people?"

Much has changed since Wilson's time, but a century and a half on, his question remains no less pertinent. For some people, such as the political scientist Eric Kaufmann, whiteness is what it has always pretended to be. Though he acknowledges that races are not genetically defined, Kaufmann nevertheless sees them as defensible divisions of humanity that have some natural basis: they emerge, he suggests, "through a blend of unconscious colour-processing and slowly evolved cultural conventions". In his 2019 book Whiteshift, Kaufmann argues that the history of oppression by white people is "real, but moot", and he advocates for something he calls "symmetrical multiculturalism", in which "identifying as white, or with a white tradition of nationhood, is no more racist than identifying as black". What shall we do with the white people? Kaufmann thinks we should encourage them to take pride in being white, lest they turn to more violent means: "Freezing out legitimate expressions of white identity allows the far right to own it, and acts as a recruiting sergeant for their wilder ideas."

From another perspective - my own, most days - whiteness means something different from other racial and ethnic identities because it has had a different history than other racial and ethnic identities. Across three-and-a-half centuries, whiteness has been wielded as a weapon on a global scale; Blackness, by contrast, has often been used as a shield. (As Du Bois put it, what made whiteness new and different was "the imperial width of the thing - the heaven-defying audacity.") Nor is there much reason to believe that whiteness will ever be content to seek "legitimate expressions", whatever those might look like. The religion of whiteness had 50 years to reform itself along non-supremacist lines, to prove that it was fit for innocuous coexistence. Instead, it gave us Donald Trump.

Yet even this does not fully answer Wilson's question. For if it's easy enough to agree in theory that the only reasonable moral response to the long and very much non-moot history of white supremacy is the abolitionist stance advocated in the pages of Race Traitor - ie, to make whiteness meaningless as a group identity, to shove it into obsolescence alongside "Prussian" and "Etruscan" - it seems equally apparent that whiteness is not nearly so fragile as Ignatiev and Garvey had imagined. Late in his life, James Baldwin described whiteness as "a moral choice", as a way of emphasising that it was not a natural fact. But whiteness is more than a moral choice: it is a dense network of moral choices, the vast majority of which have been made for us, often in times and places very distant from our own. In this way whiteness is a problem like climate change or economic inequality: it is so thoroughly imbricated in the structure of our everyday lives that it makes the idea of moral choices look quaint.

As with climate change, however, the only thing more difficult than such an effort would be trying to live with the alternative. Whiteness may seem inevitable and implacable, and Toni Morrison surely had it right when she said that the world "will not become unracialised by assertion". (To wake up tomorrow and decide I am no longer white would help no one.) Even so, after 350 years, it remains the case, as Nell Irvin Painter argues, that whiteness "is an idea, not a fact". Not alone, and not without much work to repair the damage done in its name, it still must be possible to change our minds.

This article was amended on 20 April 2021 to correct a reference to Eric Williams being the first president of Trinidad and Tobago. He was in fact the first prime minister.

Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, llisten to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here.

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The invention of whiteness: the long history of a dangerous idea

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The long read: Before the 17th century, people did not think of themselves as belonging to something called the white race. But once the idea was invented, it quickly began to reshape the modern world

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Field at a Crossroads: Genetics and Racial Mythmaking

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Why 'race' is not genetic or even biological

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Why 'race' is not genetic or even biological

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Forefathers of Race Science

With race firmly ensconced in the scientific conscience, the rush began to validate its divisions with measurements and experiments.

It was heartbreaking to see my work used that way.

Critics of the use of continental categories in genetics point not only to the social dangers of reifying biological categories that align closely with popular notions of race; they also argue that a reliance on these categories holds back science. The practice gives the impression "that these groups are a particularly special way of dividing up the human species, such that you capture something important about the structural variation. And that's just not true," said Oregon State University philosophy professor Jonathan Kaplan, who has written extensively on the bioethical issues in genetics research. There are other ways, he added, to parse genetic variation that would produce very different categories that look nothing like continental divisions.

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Lumping the people of any continent into a single group can erase important nuances of human variation, but it does a particular disservice to the people of Africa, said Kaplan. DNA evidence suggests that humans have been living and evolving in Africa twice as long as it has in any other continent, and Africa is home to an outsized share of humanity's genetic diversity.

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"To refer to the African population," said Kaplan, "is to refer to something that doesn't really exist, because it's a conglomerate of several populations, each of which is as different and as large as the ones they're being compared to."

Ascribing Meaning to Difference

Daniel Benjamin has known for years that white supremacists have been interested in his work at the intersection of genetics and cognitive ability. The effort to identify links between genes and traits related to intelligence is fraught and controversial; white supremacists have especially latched onto the claim that people of European ancestry are inherently more intelligent than those of African ancestry, despite the lack of evidence to support it.

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"There are these fringe figures in the scientific community who are constantly writing papers comparing across racial groups," Benjamin said, adding that he was aware of conversations about this fringe science that were taking place in white supremacist online communities.

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Yet Benjamin and other scientists have continued to pursue the line of study, and funding agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, have continued to support it. (In an email to Undark, an NIH spokesperson wrote that the agency is "examining the implications from this field of research," and that they "are mindful of the capacity for genomic research to be an impetus for revolutionary change as well as incredible, irreversible harm.") Benjamin's hope is that polygenic scores developed for educational attainment and other measures of behavioral and social traits will one day improve the analysis of social science experiments. As he envisions it, the scores could be used in randomized studies, in much the same way that scientists try to control for family income or parents' educational level. The thinking is that by controlling for genetics, researchers could better estimate the effectiveness of interventions.

That researchers so regularly privilege continental ancestry categories over the myriad alternatives, Lewis said, could be obscuring potentially interesting science.

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Field at a Crossroads: Genetics and Racial Mythmaking

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Forefathers of Race Science With race firmly ensconced in the scientific conscience, the rush began to validate its divisions with measurements and experiments. It was heartbreaking to see my work used that way.

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Fundamentals, Core Concepts, System of White Supremacy and White Privilege

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The New York Times reports that the term "white supremacy" was used fewer than 75 times in 2010, but nearly 700 times in 2020 alone (as of the article 's printing on Oct 17, 2020). In the past, the term construed extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazis.

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Racism is 'fundamental cause' of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among ethnic minorities

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Racism is ‘fundamental cause’ of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among ethnic minorities

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Racism is ‘fundamental cause’ of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among ethnic minorities

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Racism is 'fundamental cause' of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among ethnic minorities

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Racism is 'fundamental cause' of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among ethnic minorities

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Racism is the 'fundamental cause' of COVID-19 vaccination hesitancy among ethnic minority groups, according to a newly published briefing from the Runnymede Trust and The University of Manchester's Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity.During the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccination programme in the UK, explanations for the lower vaccination ...

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Advancing racial and ethnic equity in health

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Advancing racial and ethnic equity in health

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Explore the current issue of The Lancet, a world leading medical journal published weekly since 1823

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In their controversial 2013 opus The Undercommon s, radicals Fred Moten and Stefano Harney detail the eponymous academic-activist ferment to which they owe their radicality. The undercommons is located in the university-more generally, in the swarm of relations and systems we could call "academia" or "intellectual life"-but is not a physical place; rather, it is a "downlow lowdown maroon community of the university ... where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong."

The undercommons is defined both by a particular kind of community and a particular kind of work. Who makes up this community? Those who "steal" from the university: those who do their work while eliding-working alongside, underneath, without much concern or attention to, or with an eye toward gaming-the structures of professionalization, profit-chasing, respectability politics, solipsistic individualism and statism that many see as entrenched within modern academia. The undercommons, in other words, is the set of social relationships that interlinks academics and intellectuals who steal paychecks, lecturing positions, office space and so on in order to do work the university would rather they not do.

What, then, is this work? It is the work Adrian Piper accomplishes when, fed up with the obsessive professionalism and bad faith of the system of academic publishing, she releases her magnum opus for free online, where it circulates to this day. It is the work Edward Said accomplishes when he is photographed throwing a stone across the Israel-Lebanon Blue Line, two years after his documentary detailing the atrocities of Israel's colonial occupation of Palestine is blacklisted from American broadcasting. This is the work of adjunct lecturers when they secretly change their syllabi after handing them over to administrations for university censorship in order to teach Cedric Robinson in Texas in 2022, and the work of department secretaries when they shadow-book a thesis room for their local abolitionist collective to meet and plot mutual-aid tactics. In the near-empty halls of anti-colonial film conferences, in after-hours drinks in Women, Gender and Sexuality department lounges, in the loosely rolled joints passed between overworked graduate students, in office hours hosted by untenured black Marxists, we flex and make manifest radical consciousness and activity.

Moten and Harney insist that this is radical work: work that aims at, and helps achieve, the abolition of the structures of evil that organize the university, and the modern world more generally. The undercommons aspires both to their abolition and the construction of new and more loving forms of life.

But how is this possible? Can Black Marxism reading groups within universities, secret department meetings within universities and anti-university screeds circulated within universities, by university professors, abolish the university as it currently stands?

After all, the university is a system: a massive network of social relations, ideological norms, monetary transfers, regulative mandates and physical institutions. And like all systems, it is nigh impossible to escape, and larger than any individual or any group of individuals within it. What can those within it do to end it?

This is not merely a problem for university abolitionism, but is one for any system-focused radical politics. The modern left is united by, if nothing else, precisely such a focus. And perhaps this is why, as philosopher Liam Kofi Bright suggests, modern leftists are possessed by an exhausting pessimism. What can the undercommons fugitive-what can any of us-do to fight systems that do not require our consent, or anyone's consent, to proceed in their grotesque machinations? What can David do against Goliath, when Goliath is no mere foe but the very air David must breathe to vocalize his declarations of war? Indeed, it might seem as though all the undercommons has to offer us are declarations: screeds and manifestos and reading groups and open-access journals. If David's stone cannot fell Goliath, what good are his words?

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Georgetown philosophy professor Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò's 2022 book, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else), seeks to help us change the world. In doing so, Elite Capture has its feet planted firmly on the ground. Táíwò has crafted a political book. It is a work aimed first and foremost at providing communicable and actionable diagnoses of political realities and strategies for their alteration-down to the final chapter, which takes its title from Marx's oft-cited proclamation "Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."

Elite Capture is the rare book that earns this quotation, and it is a wake-up call: a sober and nonantagonistic explication of the ways in which our politics, often through no fault of our own, often despite our own best intentions, become waylaid en route to their promised land. To change the world we must, in Táíwò's words, work toward a constructive politics. As he defines it, this kind of politics would "focus on outcome over process: the pursuit of specific goals or results, rather than mere avoidance of 'complicity' in injustice or promotion of purely moral or aesthetic principles."

We've become more concerned with the state of our souls than the state of the world. Corporate antiracist training promises to sanctify white folks; cancellations purport (but usually fail) to excise the morally compromised from our communities, lest their impurity infect us. In short, the current age is simultaneously defined by the ubiquity of political discourse and an increasing lack of interest in doing anything to change the status quo. Táíwò argues that this is the result of the phenomenon of "elite capture." Elite Capture is focused on the way this co-optation occurs in a particular social domain-identity politics-although Táíwò's commitment to constructive politics extends beyond it.

The dilemma of identity politics, as Táíwò sees it, is that it hampers, rather than helps, constructive political projects. This is a complaint that various leftists, particularly the most class-obsessed among us, have long made. What distinguishes Elite Capture from other, often whinier criticisms of identity politics-whether from the right or the left-is Táíwò's diagnosis of the seduction of identity politics: why it's happening, where it's coming from and what it looks like. Táíwò makes it abundantly clear throughout the book that identity politics-when simply understood as the construction of political agendas based on interests that accrue to particular social identities, and an attention to those identities as a way to access those interests- could be a genuinely constructive political project.

The problem, on his view, is that identity politics has been twisted by elite capture-a process where "the advantaged few steer resources and institutions that could serve the many toward their own narrower interests and aims." If this description sounds exceedingly generalizable, that's because it is. Elite capture is a way of describing how elitism-the possession of disproportionate power and influence-functions. And it is, of course, everywhere. As Táíwò puts it, "it's not just that wokeness is too white. It's that everything is." Identity politics doesn't fail because it is somehow inherently anti-radical; it fails because we live in a world structured to make it fail.

What Táíwò is after is something more than just an analysis of the way the world works, or a fiery polemic against bad actors and evil reactionaries. Elite Capture is characterized by a rare honesty, the kind that makes it possible for us to figure out what needs to be done and how to get down to doing it. If leftists like myself read it with a growing sense of embarrassment, that's on us. The point is not to wallow in that shame, but to direct it toward productive action, toward the world beyond us.

That world is organized by systems crafted by and for elite interests. Those with power have, throughout centuries, developed institutions and infrastructures-of governance, of knowledge circulation, of resource distribution and more-that ensure that they retain power. Of course, such disproportionate power is usually attained by brutalizing those without it. Such brutalizing systems are, ultimately, what makes the world run as it does. Systems-not people, and not even powerful people. As such, if one removes the powerful people, or replaces them, or reorganizes them, and the systems still remain, then the world continues as it is.

The existence of such structures is supposedly generally accepted. "Systemic racism" has become an inescapable mantra, often even among reactionary political camps. And yet, Táíwò argues, this supposedly systemic orientation has failed to bring about an actual emphasis on systematic political activity. Instead, our focus has become increasingly centered on certain individuals' moral and psychological security. Antiracist trainings don't teach the Wall Street elites they pander to how to annihilate the evils of global racial capitalism; they teach them how to pronounce non-Western names correctly, how to funnel money to scholarships for top-tier private universities, how to avoid making their black CEO (currently raking in a seven-digit salary) feel awkward about their hair texture.

Identity politics, Táíwò acknowledges, has no special immunity to elite capture, and one form this kind of manipulation has taken within identity politics is in the emergence of what he calls "deference politics." Deference is currently ubiquitous; it's there in every demand that white leftists "sit down and shut up" when black people begin talking, that television executives hire queer people to tell queer stories, that first-generation college students run seminar discussions on Marx. In such a politics, we "defer" to people who appear "to fit a social category associated with some form of oppression" on the assumption that they have some sort of privileged experience of that oppression and thus have privileged access to correct diagnoses of, and good strategies for dismantling, the evils in question.

Táíwò is cautious, but not wholly pessimistic, about the usefulness of such deference, which might work better if we took more care to defer to the right people. But, Táíwò argues, the settings in which this kind of politics take place are structurally weighted against our ever doing so. This is because these settings are invariably subject to elite capture. As he puts it in a particularly sharp passage:

In my experience as an academic and organizer, when people have said they needed to "listen to the most affected," it wasn't usually because they intended to set up Skype calls to refugee camps or to collaborate with houseless people. Acting on this conception of "centering the most marginalized" would require a different approach entirely, in a world where 1.6 billion people live in inadequate housing (slum conditions) and 100 million are unhoused, a full third of the human population does not have reliable drinking water, and the intersections of food, energy, and water insecurity with the climate crisis have already displaced 8.5 million people in South Asia alone, while threatening to displace tens of millions more.

Call it a killjoy. But Táíwò is right here, and I'm tempted to say that it would take a heady blend of narcissism and naïveté to suggest otherwise.

If marginalized elites-elites like me and Táíwò-are the ones given deference, then even if we respond with the purest and most earnest of intentions, the "politics of deference" will emphasize "the consequences that are likeliest to show up in rooms where elites do most of their interacting." Radical leftism becomes centered on the evils that manifest themselves most in the lives of people like Táíwò and myself, and thus becomes concerned with the political activities that address those evils: activities like citational justice, equitable artistic and symbolic representation, rituals of bereavement and apologia, just tenure practices, fair rates for freelance critics and so on. Meanwhile, as Táíwò reminds us, citational justice isn't what got folks in Flint, Michigan clean water; nor will such elite-centered political activities give them any reason to recultivate trust in their governing institutions. The point is not that these activities are never worth doing; they are, when they are aimed at eradicating evil in the world. It's just that a constructive politics-a comprehensive politics, one that works to eradicate all evil, not just that which afflicts the powerful-requires something more.

Táíwò's own rendition of this story is much less stodgy than my own. Elite Capture is brisk and focused, moving swiftly through its analysis without spending much time on necessary and sufficient conditions and the definitions of terms. This is not just for the sake of a vague gesture at "accessibility," whatever that means. (Táíwò would surely balk at the notion that a book generally out of reach for the vast majority of the global population can be called "accessible.") Elite Capture has different ambitions. Its sentences-pointed, frank and clipped, almost curt-read like staccato bursts of insight from an organizer, not an academic. Its gaze is firmly locked outside itself, away from Táíwò, away from the self-serving moral and intellectual tics of its readers, and squarely at the fucked-up world we have and the different one we can build.

This pragmatic focus manifests not only in Elite Capture 's form, but in its near-obsessive attention to structures, structures, structures. Systematicity-the very systematicity I summoned in order to fret over the undercommons fugitive-has become subsumed by elite capture by way of a languid nihilism, a doomed fixation on the impossibility of moral activity from within evil systems, a warped causal picture of the world according to which human behavior has no power in the face of the Lovecraftian behemoths we call social structures.

Táíwò wants us to see that structures do things. Inasmuch as it is possible-and he repeatedly admits that the possibility may be limited-any radical project must therefore do things to structures (abolish them, or transform them, or build new ones). What may send orthodox leftists muttering is that Táíwò is quite secure in insisting that we -human beings, individuals-can do things to structures-perhaps not abolish or rewire them with a snap of the fingers, but do the infinitely more grim and infinitely more productive work of chipping away at them, transforming them at the minutest levels, using the materials, the human connections, the epistemic heuristics and on-the-fly strategies that lay directly in front of us. He has no time for nihilism.

Perhaps this is why Táíwò's portraits of individual activists throughout the book never feel anti-systematic. He writes of anti-colonial liberation fighters like Paulo Freire and Lilica Boal, whose work in Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau included the creation of genuine live alternatives to the colonial and elite educational system their communities inherited. Táíwò focuses on the ways Boal and Freire, and their many comrades, worked to ensure that the schools they opened evaded elite capture: by focusing on educating children displaced by colonial violence and anti-colonial resistance, ensuring that their basic needs were met, circulating education resources to the broader community, organizing school schedules and practices around the local communities' needs and norms, pursuing full gender parity, and so on. Such accounts do not read as paeans to the primacy of the individual, but as clear-eyed strategies toward structural transformation.

One review of Táíwò's book has accused it of suggesting that "bad decisions and choices on the part of individuals are to blame" for elite capture. This is odd, when Táíwò writes, over and over again, that "to blame the problems of elite capture entirely on [elites'] moral success and failures is to confuse effect for cause." This misreading is demonstrative of the way systematicity has become a leftist bogeyman, summoned to scare straight naïve radicals itching to do something about the world (and inadvertently convincing them that there's nothing they can do). In such a misreading, the necessary cohesion of systematic analysis and individual action is erased by a rewired, now fatalistic, causal story. The work of world-building becomes a theoretical null space. Táíwò's book, if attended to, is an opportunity for modern leftists to unlearn this entrenched pessimism, with what the philosopher William Paris might call a hope beyond optimism: a hope built not on scientific predictions or heaven-sent faith, but on a dogged persistence in the relentless, everyday work of getting shit done.

To be sure, this kind of hope lacks the sweeping grandiosity of leftist dogma. Very well. Grandiosity, Táíwò would remind us, is not the litmus test of a political strategy. Its usefulness is what matters.

●

Does the undercommons satisfy this test? How can studying, thinking, reading and writing change the world?

This is no mere academic question. After all, Elite Capture itself is undercommons work. It is the project of a fugitive intellectual, one unwilling to accept the mode of study called "knowledge production" and one invested in a radical politics ostensibly unacceptable to the systems within which he resides. But, like Moten and Harney themselves, Táíwò's fugitive work remains dangerously close to the very systems that worry him. A university professor and professional philosopher, Táíwò's previous book, Reconsidering Reparations, was written firmly in the specialist language of academic philosophy and has been lauded by the elites who populate that space. Elite Capture has done quite well for itself too. It's been reviewed and profiled, with almost universal acclaim, by the writers at the bastions of the chattering classes, from the Nation to the New York Times and, now, The Point. It will doubtless be read in many university classrooms; indeed, one can morbidly imagine corporate antiracist trainings passing out excerpts alongside Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility. Given the book's descriptions of, well, elite capture, the irony is unmistakable.

The question of the undercommons' radicalism, then, applies to Elite Capture too. And this, if we heed Táíwò's own warnings, cannot be treated as a matter of moral purity. The question worth asking is: How can the undercommons, in which Elite Capture endeavors to participate, change the world?

Moten and Harney locate the radicalism of the undercommons in its approach to social life. They believe:

Study is what you do with other people. It's talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice.

Summoned out of themselves, the undercommons theorists are driven to speak when a human being sends something their way; they are pulled into social orbit by the unnamable gravity that every human being exudes and by which every human being is drawn to one another. The fugitive intellectual is a fugitive from the way of relating to other people that objectifies them, alienates them, treats their utterances as hypotheses to test or attacks to defend against. This thinker, this speaker and hearer, performs the ultimate act of love: attending carefully to what others have to say, because they care that the other cares enough to say it. They receive an invitation: not an invitation to retreat to a monastic refuge and think the universe in order, but to turn toward the one who has made an unsalvageable, blissful debtor out of them and speak back, with feeling, and an ear open for an altered echo.

Táíwò has reminded us of the stakes of radical work. A constructive politics must deliver more than tenure for elites, pay raises for elites, state apologies for elites. The university is not abolished when Moten gets a MacArthur. It is abolished when universities no longer exist to fund fossil-fuel extraction and private prisons, or funnel elites into state-surveillance branches and global banks. How does study-even study steeped in sociality-get us closer to that world, or the world of any genuinely radical, genuinely transformative politics? Can the politics of the undercommons be genuinely constructive? Can the undercommons escape elite capture? Can Elite Capture?

●

Can this review? What does it matter if I manage to convince the graduate students and journal editors who read The Point that Táíwò is an accomplished writer or a gifted rhetorician? What does it matter if I successfully litigate Táíwò's correct or incorrect applications of Marxist or decolonial analysis? Are such concerns not further proof of the absorption of Táíwò's project, of my commitments, into the circulatory system of racial capitalism laying waste to the world beyond your laptop screen?

If all criticism is capable of performing are such adjudications-attributions of symbolic totems of praise or disapproval-then the answer is simple. Criticism is elite capture; criticism is the death of abolition; criticism is the death of politics.

But what if we did an undercommons kind of criticism? How might criticism-the act of speaking about another's speech, the act of thinking aloud, in the public, about what another has thought-become a social gesture? Or, I misspeak. This is an invitation to see criticism as the act not of speaking about, but speaking with.

When critics fail to embrace this undercommons possibility, both disagreement and agreement-with the artist, with the reader-fail to be opportunities for connection. They become nothing but opportunities for a declaration, a decision, an assertion. The other, in their difference, is not someone to hear and be changed by but someone to talk to, or even toward. Call this adjudicatory criticism: a criticism that cares about nothing but evaluation, a criticism that does not care about care.

Somewhere along the way, I realized that to write a review of Elite Capture worth writing, I had to become the kind of critic who asked, "How could Elite Capture change the world? How might it be useful?" rather than "Is Elite Capture good or bad?" I realized this because I realized that that, after all, would be the only useful thing for me to do.

But it is Elite Capture itself that asked me to be useful. I did not simply bring a radical pragmatism to this book; Táíwò pulled it out of me. That is, my notion of what it took for a review of Elite Capture to be worth writing was not foreign to its contextual landscape, the world Táíwò had constructed for us, with us, together. I had to enter that world without ethnographic remove and be moved, be affected, be undone and redone by what Táíwò has done. In other words, Elite Capture asked me to join a conversation, not judge its success.

To really listen to Táíwò is to hear his plea to care about changing that world; and to take that plea seriously is to be moved by it, to see it as a call that makes a claim on me, as a call that is not asking me just to evaluate but to care. Rather than searching for criticism's heroic potential, its utopian capacities, we should see it as a fundamentally human-and thus fundamentally shared-extension of life: compromised, complicit, and seeking to build a better world from that compromised complicity, which is nothing more or less than the condition of living a radical human life in a state of evil.

We need to be convinced to embrace constructive politics-in deed as well as word-because we live in a world structured by the consistent elite capture of our political spirit. That is simply true. The fundamental message of Táíwò's book is that eliding this condition, erasing our complicity, should not be the focus of our radicalism. It is impossible and beside the point. We must, instead, accept this condition as our starting point.

The sociality of the undercommons is the condition of possibility of you and me being taught to care; we do not enter it as revolutionary agents, but become such by moving into it, by being moved by it. Perhaps it would be better if we lived in a world in which elites did not need to fumble our way through the undercommons, through the murky depths in which revolutionary consciousness is put on the path to be made black, to be made strong. We do not. Perhaps it would be better if you did not need to read this book. You do.

Human beings transform only when we refuse to cordon ourselves off from each other behind a vulgar individualism. The sociality of the undercommons is meant to serve as a corrective to such vulgarity, in service of the glorious obscenity of living with other people. I tried to read Elite Capture with a heart open to such obscenity; I hope you do too.

Will all this chattering be useful? That depends entirely on what we do next.

Art credit: Forrest Kirk. Secret Handshake (2021), acrylic, spray paint and Gorilla Glue on canvas. Courtesy of the artist.

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In their controversial 2013 opus The Undercommon s, radicals Fred Moten and Stefano Harney detail the eponymous academic-activist ferment to which they owe their radicality. The undercommons is located in the university-more generally, in the swarm of relations and systems we could call "academia" or "intellectual life"-but is not a physical place; rather, it is a "downlow lowdown maroon community of the university ...

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Professional Footballers’ Perceptions of the Conceptual Divide Between Bullying and Banter

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Professional Footballers’ Perceptions of the Conceptual Divide Between Bullying and Banter

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Sport and Physical Activity Research Centre, Health Research Institute, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, United Kingdom

School of Education and Lifelong Learning, University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom

This study explores professional footballers' perceptions of where banter crosses the conceptual line into bullying. The study's focus is of importance, given the impact that abusive behaviors have been found to have on the welfare and safeguarding of English professional footballers. A phenomenological approach was adopted, which focused on the essence of the participants' perceptions and experiences. Guided by Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), individual semi-structured interviews ( M Duration = 44.10 min, SD = 10.81) were conducted with 18 male professional footballers ( M age  = 19.83 years, SD = 2.96) from three Premier League and Championship football clubs. The findings from this study revealed several key superordinate themes in relation to the dividing line between bullying and banter. These themes included "perception," "intentionality," "detecting the line," and "having a bit of banter." The findings demonstrate how perceptions of bullying and banter are nuanced by individual differences among the players and the culture of the professional football context. Specifically, it was found that the professional football context can legitimize forms of humor blurring the lines between bullying and banter, challenging the typically positive view of the concept of banter in this environment. From an applied perspective, these findings highlight the need for coaches, players, and football clubs more broadly to address cultural expectations around banter in their environment, while educating individuals around their own perceptions of bullying and banter.

Introduction

Recent findings of discrimination at Yorkshire County Cricket Club demonstrate serious concerns around the perceptions of what is acceptable in UK sport culture, given behaviors, such as "racial harassment and bullying," were passed away as "friendly, good-natured banter" ( BBC, 2021a). The findings in cricket echo those in professional football (or soccer), where a plethora of allegations have been linked to the safeguarding and welfare of its players ( BBC, 2018, 2021b, c). More specifically, these allegations have often centered around allegations of bullying within this context ( BBC, 2019, 2021b). Although research has started to respond to concerns around bullying in professional football ( Newman et al., 2021a, b), it has highlighted the need for a greater understanding of the perceptions of this behavior in this context. Furthermore, given the extent to which more severe forms of banter can be normalized in professional football ( Parker, 2006), it is important to explore when this behavior crosses the line into bullying.

A potential explanation for limitations in understanding around bullying, as well as banter, revolves around the conceptualization of these terms in sport. Currently, research tends to favor Olewus' (1993, p. 8) much cited definition ( Volk et al., 2014) that bullying is "an intentional, negative action which inflicts injury and discomfort on another." Olewus' (1993) definition also highlights an imbalance of power whereby an individual finds it difficult to defend themselves. Given football's position as a profession, it feels noteworthy to state that workplace research echoes this view of bullying, while also outlining the persistent nature of this behavior and the inherent power differentials between the bully and victim ( Sischka et al., 2021). In contrast, though significant efforts have gone into defining bullying, much less work has been invested in defining banter. To date, banter has been described as an interaction which serves to improve relationships ( Dynel, 2008). Although this behavior can be aggressive, banter is seen to be challenging, yet playful, and generally occurs between friends ( Steer et al., 2020). From a definitional stance, it appears that bullying and banter are clearly separate concepts. Though findings in professional football demonstrate concerns that banter may be more severe in this context, with players legitimizing various verbal and relational bullying through this term ( Newman et al., 2021b). This may create ambiguity around the degree to which banter is separate from bullying. In part, this ambiguity may be reinforced by professional football's "hidden curriculum" which teaches players they need to put up with bullying as a show of their masculine worth ( Cushion and Jones, 2014). In this light, it is potentially unsurprising that welfare and safeguarding issues may be present in professional football. These issues may also be compounded by whether bullying is viewed from the victim's or perpetrator's perspective ( Kowalski, 2000) within professional football. It is important to highlight that perpetrators, for example, often view their behaviors as more benign, humorous, and less severe than their victims.

As a response to issues in practice with understanding terms, such as bullying, researchers have sought to develop models which conceptualize this behavior. Within the sporting literature examples of such models remain relatively sparse, though Stirling's (2009) conceptual framework of maltreatment in sport provides a guide. This model illustrates how maltreatment can be categorized into two forms: relational and non-relational, depending on whether this maltreatment occurs within the context of a "critical relationship" or not. A critical relationship is determined by whether it has significant influence over an individual's sense of safety trust, and fulfillment of needs, with examples in sport including athletes' relationships with their parents and coaches ( Stirling, 2009). According to Stirling, bullying acts as a form of non-relational maltreatment because it occurs in the context of a "non-critical" peer-to-peer relationship, due to the bully not being in an official position of authority over the victim. This is contrasted with abuse which is the result of a "critical relationship" situation where one figure is in a position of authority, such as a coach. While this model supports our understanding of bullying in sport, subsequent research has highlighted potential issues with how some terms within the model are conceptualized. For example, in both sport and the wider workplace, bullying has been found to emerge in the context of a "critical relationship" due to the behavior of those in formal positions of power, such as coaches and supervisors ( Hershcovis, 2011; Newman et al., 2021b). Moreover, Stirling's (2009) conceptual framework was not extended to concepts, such as banter, which in its "bad" form has been found to have the same repetitive, harmful hallmarks of bullying ( Steer et al., 2020). Therefore, it would appear that research may be warranted to explore this "grey area of interpretation" around bullying and banter ( Steer et al., 2020), specifically in cultures which legitimize derogatory forms of banter, such as professional football ( Parker, 2006).

In relation to derogatory behavior, it is worth noting that findings in sport illustrate a culture whereby abusive and bullying practices are normalized ( Alexander et al., 2011; Papaefstathiou et al., 2013). Within professional football, abusive and intimidatory behaviors are commonplace ( Kelly and Waddington, 2006), while bullying is often "celebrated" as a show of an individual's masculine worth ( Parker, 2006). Set within this context, it highlights the potential for welfare and safeguarding issues to occur in football. In response to this, the English Football Association (FA) sought to address these cultural issues by commissioning research around child protection ( Brackenridge et al., 2004) through to the implementation of a network of Designated Safeguarding Officers (DSO; The FA, 2021). While these have been encouraging steps, the reported cases of bullying within professional football (e.g., BBC, 2019, 2021a) appear to demonstrate a preference remains to adhere to the "sport ethic," which prioritizes performance over wellbeing ( Hughes and Coakley, 1991). Furthermore, cultured beliefs in sport that performance is based on mental toughness, resilience, and perseverance ( Kerr and Stirling, 2019) may also mean that player welfare around aspects, such as bullying and banter, is not considered to the extent it should be.

Overall the findings suggest that issues around bullying and a lack of awareness around when banter becomes inappropriate may result from the organizational culture of the sport, coupled with a lack of education of the various stakeholders in this context ( Owusu-Sekyere and Gervis, 2016). It is apparent that despite some initial findings from coaches around how these terms may be separated, these stakeholders play a significant role in inadvertently blurring the lines between these behaviors, shifting the borderlines around what is acceptable behavior ( Kerr et al., 2016; Newman et al., 2021a). These shifts are already problematic in terms of protecting footballers' welfare, given that banter has been found to mask discriminatory behavior, such as racism and homophobia ( Adams et al., 2010; Hylton, 2018). The consequence is that this may feed a discourse among footballers where bullying and banter are used interchangeably and the conceptual divide between the two is unclear ( Newman et al., 2021b). As a result, the potentially prosocial aspects of banter in sport may be lost and a more severe version of this behavior is enacted. To lose this, potentially more "inclusive" form of banter may be unfortunate as banter has been found to be central to male friendships in sport, fostering a sense of community and solidarity, while increasing cohesion and bonding ( Wagstaff et al., 2017; Lawless and Magrath, 2021).

Therefore, due to uncertainty around how professional footballers conceptualize bullying and banter, the present study sought to explore the dividing line between these concepts. Specifically, the study aimed to explore players' perceptions of these concepts and their views around the point at which banter crosses the line into bullying. Moreover, the present study set out to explore how bullying and banter were framed in the professional football context.

Materials and Methods

This study was part of a larger research project which explored bullying within professional football.

Research Design

The present study adopted a qualitative, cross-sectional, and semi-structured interview design that was guided by the principles of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA; Dwyer et al., 2019). IPA was regarded as the ideal approach to address the study's aims, given its focus on how the person (e.g., players) makes sense of their experiences ( Larkin et al., 2011) of bullying and banter in the context of professional football. Here, both the researcher and participant were engaged in a "double hermeneutic" in order to make sense of the player's lifeworld ( Dwyer et al., 2019). Furthermore, IPA was appropriate for addressing the taken-for-granted assumptions of professional football, while offering a detailed, nuanced analysis of bullying and banter ( Newman et al., 2021a). By focusing on these nuances, the present study unearthed convergences and divergences within and across the participants' accounts, maintaining the idiographic commitment of IPA ( Smith et al., 2009). In addition, by exploring the conceptual divide between bullying and banter within professional football, the study was also consistent with the "contextualist" position of IPA ( Larkin et al., 2006).

Participants

Professional football was selected as the context for the present study due to the potential severity of banter, as well as celebration of bullying in this environment ( Parker, 2006; Newman et al., 2021a). On this basis, it was felt that exploring the conceptual divide (e.g., the point at which one behavior is viewed as crossing into another) between bullying and banter was imperative to help safeguard the future welfare of those within football. Participants were recruited from three professional football clubs in the English Premier League and Championship divisions. In accordance with IPA guidelines ( Smith, 2016), a purposive sampling strategy was utilized to identify a homogenous sample of 18 male professional footballers ( M = 19.83, SD = 2.96, range = 18-31 years). The sample size was consistent with previous research identified as displaying good practice of IPA in sport ( McDonough et al., 2011; Smith, 2016). Players were formally contracted to their club and had between 2 and 14 years of experience as a professional. Table 1 provides an overview of the participants' demographic characteristics.

Table 1. Participant ages and years of experience as a professional football player.

Procedure

Following institutional ethical approval, a range of potential gatekeepers were contacted to identify which English professional football clubs were willing to take part in the study. These gatekeepers were sports science and medical staff who provided support to the players but who were not responsible for their selection to the team. Once gatekeepers indicated that clubs were willing to take part, a briefing meeting was held with players who were interested in participating. After this, participants who agreed were supplied with an information sheet and completed consent forms.

The interview guide was developed and refined in accordance with best practice guidelines for IPA research within the sporting context, such that it provided a stimulus to get the participants talking, yet it was used flexibly throughout as it could not be predicted what each participant would say ( Smith, 2016). Specifically, the guide was driven by the phenomenological commitment to meaning-making, with key questions being used as the basis for starting the discussion with the players (e.g., "can you tell me what banter in football is?" and "how do you recognize when it is banter rather than bullying?"), where appropriate probing techniques (e.g., "can you tell me more about that?") were used to explicate the question ( Dwyer et al., 2019). Piloting of the initial interview guide with the first three participants revealed that the questions were clear and yielded appropriate data. Therefore in accordance with previous IPA research, these interviews were included in the final analysis ( Mawson et al., 2011). In order to replicate the context of the study, interviews lasted between 35 and 70 min ( M Duration  = 44.11, SD = 10.81) and were conducted at the matchday venue or training ground of the participants. After the completion of the interviews, participants were reminded of how their data would be kept confidential and their rights to withdraw. Following this, all interviews were transcribed verbatim and participants' names were replaced by pseudonyms.

Data Analysis

In order to maintain the idiographic commitment of IPA, interviews were analyzed in turn using the guidelines set out by Smith et al. (2009). Firstly, audio files were listened back to and then, transcripts were read and re-read in order to immerse oneself in the lifeworld of the participant ( Dwyer et al., 2019). The next step involved a close analysis of the text, noting exploratory comments in the right margin of the transcript. These comments were either descriptive, linguistic, or conceptual in nature, in order to identify potential meaning in the account ( Smith and Osborn, 2006). Next, emergent theme titles were developed in the left margin of the text, using psychological concepts where appropriate, to capture the essential meaning in the account ( Smith and Osborn, 2006). Then, emergent themes were clustered via a process of abstraction and subsumption which ultimately ended with a specification of superordinate themes for each case ( Conroy and de Visser, 2013). This process was repeated for each participant. Finally, the combined superordinate themes from across the participants' accounts were verified against the original transcripts, in order to ensure that the appropriate range of convergence and divergence had been captured ( Conroy and de Visser, 2013). At all stages of the analysis, regular discussions were held between the authors who were all experienced in publishing IPA research. The first author completed each stage of the analysis with the other authors acting as "critical friends" ( Smith and McGannon, 2018). As Smith and McGannon (2018) describe, the role of "critical friends" was not to help achieve consensus but to act as a theoretical sounding board to encourage reflection on multiple and alternative interpretations within the analysis and subsequent writing.

Research Quality

Results

Following best practice recommendations for high quality IPA studies, present study identified themes at the superordinate level. These four superordinate themes were "perception," "intentionality," "detecting the line," and "having a bit of banter." The notion of perception connects with the other themes creating a rich, cohesive narrative ( Nizza et al., 2021) around how views on bullying and banter are open to interpretation. In this section, each theme is described and illustrated with quotes ( Conroy and de Visser, 2013), as well as supporting interpretative commentary.

Perception

Perception was at the heart of the individual players' perspectives regarding whether behavior was seen as bullying or banter. In a lot of cases, footballers discussed perception from the victim's perspective but they also highlighted how the perpetrator's perception of their own intentions is vital. From a victim's perspective, extracts such as James' revealed that perception drives whether behaviors are seen as bullying, "the big thing for me is individual perception. What some people class as banter, some people class as bullying. What some people find funny, other people do not find funny." This account highlighted the importance of an individual's perception of their line yet showed how the placement of this varies. James' view of the divide between bullying and banter was categorical in the sense that he used language around "some people's classification," as a means of clearly separating these concepts.

For younger players, such as Greg however, the divide between bullying and banter was seen as more nuanced and less clear-cut:

Oh...I dunno...it's hard...I find it [the divide] is difficult to describe unless you gave me different scenarios, situations. Then I can probably say yeah, I think that's bullying or no, that's not. But I think it's hard for me to say it because you do not know. People deal with things in different ways and there'll be some people who'll be happier with things being done to them or said than others. So, it's a hard one to say.

Greg's reference to not knowing and finding it "hard" portrayed a certain anguish and complexity with identifying these behaviors, raising questions about whether there is a line between banter and bullying. Moreover, this account echoed James' view that these terms can be categorized. However, given Greg could not clearly distinguish the two concepts, highlighted the challenges for players to conform to professional football's expectations regarding behavior. Latterly, his quote also implied that some individuals are regarded as being able to "take" behaviors better than others. This fueled a sense that bullying in football is a result of a potential "problem" on the victim's side.

This problem of perception was furthered by Ed, when he discussed the differences in perspectives around bullying and banter from both the victim's and potential perpetrator's side:

Cos they may feel like I'm being picked on and when they speak to [the] person, they say "oh no it's not that it's only banter" [but] he [the perpetrator has] taken it way too far.

Ed's extract was indicative of a feeling that speaking out around bullying behavior may be especially difficult for victims in football. Seemingly, the power to determine what is banter or not is held by the perpetrator, posing significant concerns for the welfare of other individuals. In this case, labeling this behavior as a more acceptable term of "banter" may also legitimize the bullying within the professional football culture. This was a view which Phil elaborated on:

Um...it's tough to say. I think you have got to be the person [the perpetrator] who's saying it to understand what they say. So, you could be sitting in the changing room and hear something come flat out of someone's mouth and you might think to yourself "well hang on a minute I do not think that's banter." But to the person saying it, "I'm only joking." I think you can only really understand whether its banter or not from the person who's saying [it]. So, if you mean it in a certain way, you will put it across as I'm saying it that way. But you have really gotta understand, understand the person and the tone of voice and then understand well are they that type of person to say in a spiteful way and to understand whether it's banter or not.

Phil's view appeared to reemphasize a belief in football, particularly among the younger players in this study, that the perpetrator's view is critical in determining whether behavior is seen as bullying or banter. This appears to warrant more education on these concepts to all involved in the game. The adoption of the perpetrator's view also excuses this individual to some degree and takes the focus away from the importance of the victim's perspective. It raises interesting questions about whether this is a view shaped in the academy environment which these players have recently progressed through or reflects individual maturation. Moreover, the stress placed by players, such as Phil on "needing to understand" the perpetrator, conveyed a sympathy for this individual rather than any potential victim of their behavior. This is especially problematic for any potential victims of "banter" in football, as by framing behavior this way, it creates an expectation this behavior must be accepted. Seemingly, excusing the perpetrator may be more important than safeguarding other individuals' welfare.

Oli offered an interesting alternative view around the degree to which the perpetrator's view may be supported, depending on insider versus outsider perspectives of banter in football:

I think on social media it would be banter, but I think people from the outside, if they have seen that. If they have seen that, they might think it's bullying and so on.

This view was reflective of an element of seclusion in professional football ( Parker and Manley, 2016) whereby the individuals within the perimeter walls or fences of the club (e.g., players and coaches) are "insiders," whereas others interested in the sport (e.g., the media and public) are "outsiders." Despite his status as an "insider," Oli made references to people on the "outside" of football seeing bullying and banter in a different way, implying that players know that their behavior would not be appropriate elsewhere. Established communities of practice in professional football ( Parker, 2006) appear to permit players to carry on behaving as they wish, while also allowing a more extreme version of banter and bullying. This creates a potential blindness to wrongdoing for professional football's "insiders." However, the advent of social media has changed the nature of professional football's inner environment, insofar as players' behavior can be observed by a much broader audience. Unwittingly, this creates a situation where potential wrongdoing in the form of bullying can be observed and the behavior of professional football's "insiders" can receive greater scrutiny. Though this does highlight an important finding that safeguarding of players may only occur when wrongdoing is observable through outside channels, such as social media.

Detecting the Line

An important perceptual element of what separated banter from bullying was the participants' views on the point at which the line starts to be crossed between these behaviors. Many of the participants highlighted how this metaphorical line is crucial in discriminating between these concepts. Yet the concept of the "line" revealed a range of perspectives on its precise identification and whether it can even be located. Kevin's view was reflective of this:

But I think there's a line with banter. And some people do not know the line, some people's lines are further away and some people's lines are very close...You can overstep and that's when you can see confrontations in football in the changing room.

Kevin's various references to "the line" were symbolic of the importance placed on this hypothetical divide between banter and bullying in football, though the differences he alluded to outline the individualistic nature of perceptions of bullying.

In a similar vein, Eric highlighted the varied nature of perceptions around the dividing line between banter and bullying. As an Irish player, he illustrated something more profound around a potential passive acceptance of racism, framed as banter: "(if someone said) or something like that, another person could be like that's racist, that's the line for him, so that's where you draw the line for him." This demonstrated a worrying example of the permitting nature of sport whereby victims of potential bullying accept behaviors described as "casual racism" as part of "humorful banter" to ease racial tensions ( Cleland, 2016; Hylton, 2018). Furthermore, the ways in which Eric highlighted differing perspectives around whether a racist term crossed the line or not, was indicative of an awareness within professional football that this behavior is inappropriate. Yet it also suggested that this could continue without sanctions, posing significant concerns for the welfare of players from minority ethnic groups in football.

Though Kevin and Eric discussed the "line" between banter and bullying as being quite variable, other players discussed something much more precise. Paul articulated that "once it goes to that line, there's not a lot of width in it and it could quickly transfer to other side." On the surface Paul's references to there being "not a lot of width" appeared a lot clearer about when banter transitions into bullying, but on closer inspection, his extract still did not identify objectifiable means of identifying either concept in football. To this end, the players' identification of a line felt somewhat tenuous, presenting significant challenges related to safeguarding players in football, as problem behaviors are hard to identify.

Others, though, were more categorical that this was possible:

If you noticed someone constantly picking on the same person you could realize that maybe they are taking it a step too far and if they are outright criticizing them in front of someone then you could notice it. (Rob).

In addition to this, Dave proposed that coaches may detect the line being crossed as: "Coaches would know really well by your body language, whether you are interested or not. Whether you are not having a good time or if you have [not] got loads of confidence." In both these cases, players outlined clear behavioral information, such as repetitive criticism and observable body language, to establish bullying rather than banter.

Although the previous extracts provided some means to uncover bullying, Kevin expressed a divergent view around ease of detection using behavioral information:

Some people's lines they do not make clear to people. And sometimes people...laugh back and really, they are not happy with the fact of what someone said but they are laughing to try and cover their insecurity. And that's when people think that guy's line's not here and they take it a bit further, and it gets to a point...that's too much and then everyone sees it in the room.

Here, Kevin's mention of the term "insecurity" came with a connotation that those in football may pathologize wrongdoing as the victim's problem. In this light, it is potentially unsurprising that these individuals do not "make their lines clear" or blow the whistle on wrongdoing as Kevin described. Despite this, Kevin did give the sense that the onus is still on the victim to flag these inappropriate acts. Meanwhile, this account also highlighted the fallibility of relying on behavioral cues to identify bullying as opposed to more prosocial banter in this context, as football's participants learn to emotionally suppress negative feelings resulting from others' behaviors. This results in a situation where it becomes "too much" as Kevin outlined and threats to individuals' welfare become more pronounced.

"Having a Bit of Banter"

Through their discussions around the themes of perception and the detection of the line, the players discussed the necessary yet debatable element of humor, resulting in a unanimous theme around the dividing line of "having a bit of banter." This was characteristic of the humor deployed by players, which was largely seen as facilitative to their cohesion as a group and performance, despite it occasionally crossing the dividing line into bullying. In the main, "having a bit of banter" was articulated in relation to players' conceptualization of banter itself:

Funny stuff, that everyone finds funny. That's when it's banter like if somebody said something to me and I found it funny about me. Say if someone was bantering me and I found it funny, like fair enough like, that's banter. (Charlie).

Charlie's account was indicative of a playful view of banter, which appears equal for both parties in the exchange, as the receiver of the joke finds the interaction "funny." However, a deeper inspection of his account demonstrates a fragile assumption that "everyone" will find certain jokes "funny" in football. This statement conflicts earlier parts of the participants' accounts where the individualistic nature of perception around banter and bullying was stressed. Despite players' awareness that banter and bullying are individually experienced and perceived, it may be that professional football shapes a belief that humor is always ok. Jamal hinted to this, "it's like, there's always banter, there's always jokes being made. But then here it's like, everyone's kind of cool with everyone kind of thing." The belief that "everyone's kind of cool, with everyone," demonstrates a prosocial view of banter which separates it from bullying behavior, yet there are risks to this assumption given players may mask the negative sides of banter, as discussed within the detecting the line theme. Furthermore, it highlights concerns about who determines what is a joke and by what means in potentially severe contexts, such as professional football.

Nonetheless, players from other clubs, such as Eric continued the positive view of banter, suggesting that these views are grounded across football contexts, rather than at particular clubs:

Someone would be can you breathe in that? Are you ok breathing...? You know, just the clothes they are wearing, or they messed up in training or you know anything as small as that like you know.

This extract was more revealing of some of the content of this banter, which typically revolves around essential components in professional football, such as identity and performance. While Kevin agreed that this process contained positive essence, he felt it needed to be treated cautiously:

["Having a bit of banter" it is] to try and bond with the team to try and get team cohesion about, even though that might be at one person's expense. I think it gels the team more banter, it can be positive and healthy, it is important. But I've seen it can...cos it's a very fine line; it can easily be pushed too far. So, it can be a very delicate subject.

Although Kevin continued the positive theme of banter in relation to bonding and team cohesion, the degree to which this behavior is "healthy" as he outlined could be questioned from the divergence within his own account. The precariousness around the "very fine line" he alluded to which can be easily transgressed, suggested something more troublesome for safeguarding players' welfare. This appeared to stretch beyond one player at a particular club, given Oli's view that "whereas banter is, can be light, it can obviously cross the line to bullying." Oli's language was especially noteworthy here, as while he described banter as "light" the apparent ease for this behavior to "cross the line into bullying" would suggest something different. Moreover, describing banter as "light" is reflective of a potential discourse in professional football which may downplay the severer side of this behavior. This perhaps questions more broadly the overwhelmingly positive view of banter, which is shaped by the identity required of a professional footballer.

This potential for banter to cross the dividing line into bullying was expressed more graphically by James:

(When the) word "fatty" is associated with somebody, they would never show that is affecting them because if they did then they would get it more because its classed as funny...It would be having a joke at their expense, to make them look better in front of everybody and not really caring about the effect it had on the individual.

This account provided a more sinister, severe perspective on the process of "having a bit of banter." It once more reaffirmed the degree to which players feel the need to suppress negative feelings associated with this form of "humor." More disturbingly, it depicted a scenario where if these feelings were revealed that this banter would become a more active form of bullying, with a blatant disregard for the welfare of its recipients. As the most experienced member of the sample, it is possible that this view was grounded in James' longevity in the sport or may have been shaped by a different expectation for players as he came through the football system. Regardless of this though, it provided enough of a sense that the positive view of banter needed to be treated cautiously, given the degree to which others expressed that the line to bullying can be crossed.

Intentionality

One of the most significant perceptual markers of the dividing line between bullying and banter involved intentionality. Previous research has highlighted this as a cornerstone of definitions of bullying ( Olewus, 1993), including how coaches view this concept in professional football ( Newman et al., 2021a). However, several contradictions were found within and between the players' accounts here, whereby acts of bullying could be seen as accidental in nature. Furthermore, the notion of intentionality was also linked to banter behaviors. This was illustrative of something important that it is very difficult to separate concepts and the dividing line between them is blurred. Nonetheless for some players, such as Lenny, they were unequivocal that bullying was intentional:

When you know it's affecting them. Cos if you do not know it's affecting them then, you are still in the wrong either way but it's difficult for you to then know, he's not enjoying this banter and it needs to stop. But if you know it's affecting him and you do something about it by stopping then that's fine. But if you keep doing it and you know it's affecting him, then that's not right and it should not happen.

Lenny's account separated bullying from banter based on bullying being a highly targeted act that carries clear intent despite obvious harm on behalf of the victim. It also included clear judgment about the behavior being "not right," showing the seriousness of this bullying. Perhaps concerningly though, Lenny's articulation of the distinction of bullying was still framed from the perpetrator's perspective. In football, it appears that if the perpetrator thinks the behavior is not affecting the victim, then it is acceptable, rather than considering the victim's perspective. This reinforced a troublesome sense that the professional football workplace may shape a view that perpetrators hold the power to frame potential wrongdoing as socially acceptable "banter." This strong sense of importance placed on the combination of targeted and repetitive behaviors underpinning bullying was also reinforced by Kevin, "I think it's consciously targeting that person...I think doing on them several, more than several times, it becomes bullying."

The characterization of bullying as an intentional act was not common to all the players within the study. For Eric, there were contradictions with other accounts of bullying, as he described an accidental act as ignorance, "I think if there was bullying going on at a club it would be just out of ignorance I think, cos I think that person's just like that guy's obviously a bit like whatever." Eric's ignorance may not seem as severe as a targeted bullying attempt, yet it does imply that there may be a passive acceptance of bullying acts in football, rather than active attempt at challenging these behaviors. A similar contradiction was illustrated by Grant:

Obviously, they know they are gonna go deep. So, I think they know, maybe, maybe they do not know but I think most people know when they go over the line and they hold their hands up...They do not mean to do it like. There's no wake up in the morning and thinking I'm going to bully this player, it's just the way they are.

Both Eric's and Grant's attempts included a degree of uncertainty around how intentional bullying is. This was interesting, given these players were from the same club, leading to potential considerations for making sure education and welfare is delivered effectively at a local level in football. For example, Grant's reference to "thinking they know" or "maybe they do not know" conveyed vagueness in perceptions of intentionality, though it could be questioned whether adopting this position provides some protection for the perpetrators of bullying, rather than concentrating on the welfare of the victims.

In contrast to those who clearly viewed the separation of bullying from banter to involve intentionality, Rob outlined an unintentional theme to wrongdoing.

But it's not like you are doing it on purpose sometimes, but you are not realizing you are doing it...It might not even be intentional, it might just be how you act to that person but you do not realize how they are feeling...But I think sometimes you do not even realize you are bullying someone, cos everyone, everyone treats other people on the scale of how they can be treated.

Rob's account further questions the centrality of intent as a component of bullying. At the same time, though it highlights the danger in assuming that banter is distinct from bullying, as individuals' non-intentional bantering or joking on behalf of the perpetrator may be significantly impacting the recipient of this behavior in football. This problem is exacerbated by the way some players conflated bullying and banter.

Um...and just not involving them in your banter or in activities you are doing away from the club and stuff like that and if they are being victimized, they are gonna try and be somebody that they are not. Like I've said numerous times, it's difficult to know when to stop the banter and the teasing and when you can have it and when you cannot. (Lenny).

Interestingly, Lenny's combination of discussion around players not being involved in the "banter" and "being victimized" suggested something more targeted than his following point about finding it hard to know when to stop banter. These forms of ostracism and targeting sounded more like bullying, yet Lenny projected a sense, through reiterating the "numerous times" he made this point, that it is hard to determine when a joke ends and more abusive behavior begins.

This confusion between bullying and banter was maintained in other participants' accounts:

I'd say the negatives would be, the negative would be just hurting, going out to intentionally hurt someone. Cos if your banter is doing it in spite of someone or to try and get to someone, then that's a really bad thing. (Phil).

While Phil directly quoted the concept of banter, the process he described in terms of an intent to harm portrayed a sense that he was describing bullying. His acknowledgment that banter could be done "to try and get to someone, then that's a really bad thing," divulged a concerning depiction of this behavior in professional football. It hinted at a feeling that banter camouflages bullying behavior and the dividing line between these concepts may not even truly exist.

Peter continued this theme by describing a targeted process in relation to both bullying and banter adding, "um...you are picking someone out and you are going out of your way to bully them or banter them in some kind of way." The mixing of the word bully and banter further conflated these concepts. What was evident in Peter's eyes was that both behaviors were targeted; however, what was less clear was the degree to which he felt these concepts are distinct. Nonetheless, this account raised further concerns about the use of banter in professional football. This was supported by Oli, "probably crosses (the line) but I think like bullying, you can accidentally bully someone, 'cos obviously the banter." Despite attempting to define bullying, this participant showed how it can be an accidental process, which is intertwined with banter. It would appear that banter is seen by some professional footballers as a vehicle for behaviors that may drift into bullying. Overall, this suggests a darker side to the general positive view of banter in football, raising questions about the degree to which a conceptual divide with bullying exists.

Discussion

The main purpose for the present study was to explore the dividing line between bullying and banter. Specifically, the study aimed to explore players' perceptions of these concepts and their views around the point at which banter crosses the line into bullying. Moreover, the present study set out to explore how bullying and banter were framed in the professional football context. Within their accounts, players highlighted a range of different means by which bullying and banter may be distinguished. This included views on the perception of bullying and banter, the degree to which the line between these concepts could be detected, the process of "having a bit of banter," and how much each concept carried an intent to harm. Nonetheless, these accounts were not consistent across participants, carrying clear implications for the safeguarding and welfare of players in professional football. On this basis, it is hoped that the findings will provide important information to professional football's key stakeholders around managing player welfare.

Central to the participants' accounts of the differences between bullying and banter was the importance placed on the perceptual divide between these concepts. While on the surface players described that these behaviors could be separated, the nuances within their accounts demonstrated that this is more difficult than first imagined. In relation to bullying, these findings fitted in line with previous research which has described the individualistic perception of this behavior ( Thornberg and Knutsen, 2011; Thornberg et al., 2012), while extending work in this area by providing a similar conceptualization of banter. Taking these findings into account, it may provide some explanation why attempts to protect player welfare in football remain limited in their success ( Parker and Manley, 2016). The individual nature of players' perceptions of bullying and banter, and the relative lack of agency players have had in expressing their views ( Pitchford et al., 2004) when codes of conducts have been designed, results in safeguarding attempts which lack efficacy.

Overall, the present study's findings provide an important conceptual and contextual addition to the research literature on bullying and banter. Given the variety in perceptions around bullying and banter, it highlights a blurred line between these concepts. This adds evidence to claims ( Kerr et al., 2016) that classifying behaviors as bullying and banter based on strict definitional criteria may be less useful in professional football. Instead, the focus should be on the behaviors enacted by individuals within this environment, as well as their perceptions of how these behaviors impact their wellbeing ( Kerr et al., 2016). The findings in relation to banter in sport specifically appear to fit with this viewpoint as participants construed this behavior in many ways. In line with the theoretical propositions of Benign Moral Violation theory ( McGraw and Warren, 2010), players outlined how this banter can be offensive yet also occurs in a situation among friends within a team. Thus, the present findings added further weight to claims banter is a complex and contradictory phenomenon in sport ( Lawless and Magrath, 2021).

From a contextual standpoint, the present study also highlights the importance of sport and particularly football, in framing views of bullying and banter. Due to the tendency of players to frame both behaviors on the peer-to-peer level, the findings extend Stirling's (2009) conceptual model of maltreatment in sport by suggesting that banter also occurs as part of a "non-critical" relationship in the same way as bullying. The present findings also tend to reaffirm that bullying (and banter) occurs in sport within relationships where there is a power imbalance but the perpetrator is not in a position of authority ( Stirling, 2009). This may make the detection of this behavior challenging, as the players highlighted bullying occurs through the social and emotional means (e.g., excluding other players and excessive banter) proposed by Stirling (2009), rather than through overt physical actions. Moreover, the findings give credence to the persistence of the "sport ethic" ( Hughes and Coakley, 1991) in professional football which focuses less on player wellbeing and potentially more on performance. The degree to which players appeared to legitimize more severe forms of banter, as well as the degree to which the perpetrator's view on what may or may not be acceptable behavior is upheld, still presents significant issues in this context. Ultimately, this might explain how and why reporting wrongdoing through safeguarding channels may remain difficult, posing continued concerns for welfare in football.

Applied Implications

As a result of the findings within the present study around how the participants conceptualized the dividing line between bullying and banter, two implications are set forward. Firstly, football's key stakeholders (e.g., coaches, players, sporting directors, and shareholders) need to be educated around the blurred conceptual line between bullying and banter, as well as the subsequent impact this may have on individual welfare. Specifically, education needs to realize the fluid, rather than binary nature of banter in professional football ( Lawless and Magrath, 2021). This fluidity means that individuals need to realize at what point the line between banter and bullying might start to be approached, as banter can quickly cross the line from acceptable, inclusionary forms of this behavior to unacceptable, exclusionary actions which mimic bullying. Education programs in professional football need to reaffirm that exclusionary forms of banter cannot be legitimized within this sport, as they transgress "acceptable" behavior ( Lawless and Magrath, 2021). Similarly, more effort is needed to identify "loaded" forms of banter with professional football's stakeholders, given harmful comments are often knowingly masked as being inoffensive. Secondly, linked to the previous point, perceptions of bullying and banter need to be challenged at all levels of professional football. Interventions need to address the normalization of severe behaviors and "banter" in this environment and provide clear channels for individuals to be able to speak out about their concerns. More work needs to focus on the actual behavior of football's various stakeholders, challenging the sense that the acceptability of actions is framed from the perpetrator's perspective. This needs to target individual, club and wider organizational level perceptions of bullying and banter, to proactively manage wellbeing in this context. For example, work focused on academy contexts may be useful to create a different culture around these concepts for new players as they enter and develop through professional football.

Limitations and Future Research Directions

Although the study made an important contribution to further understanding the conceptual divide between bullying and banter, it does present limitations that need consideration. Firstly, while the present study addressed an important issue by exploring players' perceptions of the divide between bullying and banter, there is still a need to engage other stakeholders' perspectives of these concepts, to better safeguard individuals in football. A focus on the views of individuals who are employed to protect wellbeing in football, such as safeguarding leads, player care officers and sport psychologists may be particularly useful in this regard. Secondly, although the present study has identified important information about the often-blurred conceptual divide between bullying and banter, it did not focus specifically on the outcomes of these behaviors. Future research may seek to explore the outcomes for both perpetrators and victims of bullying and banter in sport, to understand the impact more fully on wellbeing. Thirdly, the present study may present linguistic issues which may be worth consideration. The use of the concepts bullying and banter was relevant to UK professional footballers, but it is less known whether these concepts are applicable within other languages or other versions of the English language. Therefore, future studies may explore the relevance of these terms both within and outside of professional football to explore whether there are similar issues in distinguishing between them. Finally, the present study remained limited to the perspective of male professional footballers. Future studies may engage the perspectives of other players, such as women professionals and male and female grassroots participants, to explore whether the findings are systemic across football as a sport.

Conclusion

The present study makes an important contribution to the literature on bullying and banter in various ways. Firstly, we identified the often-blurred conceptual divide between bullying and banter. This serves to challenge potential misconceptions around banter being seen as a solely prosocial behavior in football. Secondly, we unearthed the importance of individual perceptions in determining what appropriate behavior is. This provides important information around the need to focus on these perceptions and avoid binary classifications of bullying and banter. Finally, we identified the importance of the culture of professional football in shaping perceptions of these behaviors. It is hoped that the present findings provide important information which can educate those in sport around the concepts of bullying and banter, while at the same time informing the future development of safeguarding and welfare programs.

Data Availability Statement

The datasets presented in this article are not readily available because of the nature of this research, participants of this study did not agree for their data to be shared publicly, so supporting data is not available. Requests to access the datasets should be directed to JN, j.newman@shu.ac.uk.

Ethics Statement

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by University of East Anglia, School of Education and Lifelong Learning Research Ethics Committee. The participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

Author Contributions

JN prepared the original draft of the manuscript and led the study's administration and investigation. VW and KR supervised, reviewed, and edited this work. All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher's Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank both the gatekeepers and their associated clubs for allowing access to a hard-to-reach sample in relation to a potentially sensitive topic matter. The authors would also like to acknowledge that data within the study have been published as part of the JN doctoral study.

Footnotes

References

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It Can Be a "Very Fine Line": Professional Footballers' Perceptions of the Conceptual Divide Between Bullying and Banter

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This study explores professional footballers' perceptions of where banter crosses the conceptual line into bullying. The study's focus is of importance, given the impact that abusive behaviors have been found to have on the welfare and safeguarding of English professional footballers. A phenomenological approach was adopted, which focused on the essence of the participants' perceptions and experiences.

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How COVID-19 exaggerated global inequities in professional sport

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How COVID-19 exaggerated global inequities in professional sport

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COVID-19's impact on training and the physical health of marginalised athletes

At the onset of the pandemic, as many were forced to stay from their workplaces, athletes were encouraged to train from home. Communication with coaches, trainers and healthcare providers was remote and required online programmes, home equipment and telehealth resources. In South Africa, like other industries, 1 those professional athletes who earned high incomes before the pandemic managed better than their lower earning peers. Home training adaptations require space, equipment, access to internet connectivity and other technologies, which meant training had to stop completely for those who lacked these resources, while it could continue for their higher income counterparts. 2 This cool-off period during lockdown compromised all aspects of effective training and periodisation, and lower ranked or marginalised athletes with less resources were further disadvantaged. 2 Less than 40% of athletes could fully perform their training programmes, 2 3 and coaches, even in high-income countries (HIC), had difficulties engaging athletes in online training because of lack of access and ability to use relevant technologies. 4 The reduced training load imposed on these athletes may have long-term impacts on injury risk, performance, rankings and remuneration in years to come.

COVID-19's impact on the mental health of marginalised athletes

The lack of training and competition also led to poor mental health outcomes in athletes struggling with the loss of structure, self-identity and financial stability. 5 For some athletes, these negative mental health effects were mitigated by home training programmes. However, those in LMICs like South Africa, whose income was precarious to begin with (eg, those with informal jobs, day labourers, migrant or undocumented workers, semiprofessional and amateur athletes), lost their livelihoods at much higher rates than their high-income counterparts, with the associated mental health effects. 1 Forced training restrictions and modifications were associated with alterations in mood and feelings of depression in over 50% of South African athletes, 6 and the prolonged uncertainty over the resumption of organised sports led to mental fatigue and reduced motivation to train. This effect was more pronounced in women athletes in general, 3 with even further impact in African women athletes. 6

COVID-19's impact on the fiscal gap

In some professional team sports associations, to support the sustainability of sport during lockdowns, virtual competitions were arranged, with winners encouraged to donate prize money to the lower ranked players, who suffered the most from the lockdown. 7 8 In some countries, governments injected funds into the sporting movement, with the most affected, such as community and youth sports, given greater priority. 7 In LMICs, however, at the best of times sports budgets are perpetually stretched and other more urgent issues such as conflict resolution, hunger and poverty eradication, and provision of sanitation receive priority. Generally, a pandemic which shuts down the global economy can push sport further down the funding priority list. When professional sport returned to our screens, this threw a lifeline for those who derive revenue from broadcast rights, helping to mitigate the loss of income for their athletes. 8 For those dependent on labour and matchday attendance to drive revenue, a return to sport without spectators did not bring much financial respite.

Eventually, as lockdowns eased, live professional (mostly men's) sport gradually returned, but under strict COVID-19 guidelines. These included maintaining social distancing, social bubbles, proper self-isolation when symptomatic, frequent handwashing, disinfecting facilities, wearing personal protective equipment, rapid deployment of test-and-trace protocols, symptom screening and monitoring, medical screening of athletes following infection and, later, vaccination. 9 As most of these were developed by sports and exercise medicine and public health specialists from HICs, 9 they were impractical in some LMICs. In addition to conducive sociocultural environments, compliance with these guidelines required financial, infrastructural, sociopolitical and human resources that most LMIC sporting federations could ill afford. Ubiquitous lack of access to general pandemic resources, running water for regular handwashing, testing (which was a prerequisite to entry in sporting venues) and vaccines when they first became available were additional hardships encountered by most LMICs. Hence, when the time came to return to sport with restrictions, the public health mandate to preserve lives superseded the socioeconomic need to preserve sport. Consequently, where professional sport in HICs could resume early in the pandemic, even without spectators, and allow athletes to earn a living, in LMICs, live training and competition were delayed or restricted, as were their associated physical, mental and financial benefits.

In conclusion, while the COVID-19 pandemic was undeniably challenging for all athletes at various levels globally, with even high-profile athletes suffering pay cuts, women, those with disabilities and/or those from LMICs bore an even larger physical, mental and financial burden. Acknowledging that the consequences of COVID-19 in athletes were exacerbated by various socioeconomic, cultural and geographical circumstances should be part of a greater commitment to a postpandemic retrospection by stakeholders to help confront persistent inequity in sport to better support marginalised athletes and avert further disparities. We are all in the same storm, but not in the same boat. 10

Acknowledgments

This article is part of a series commissioned by BJSM for the World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH) 2022. BJSM peer reviewed, edited and made the decision to publish. The lead author(s) received a small honorarium for this work. The series, including open access fees and honorarium, is funded by WISH, which is an initiative of the Qatar Foundation.

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'We are not all in the same boat. We are in the same storm. Some are on super-yachts. Some have just the one oar.' How COVID-19 exaggerated global inequities in professional sport

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The important mental, physical, social and fiscal role of organised, professional sport in our lives as athletes, athlete support personnel, consumers and various stakeholders was highlighted by the gaping hole its absence left after global COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions brought professional sporting activities to a standstill.

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CEO Statement: Racism in the Sport Sector

The issue of racism in sport is not new to us, our organisation has been advocating and campaigning for racial equality for over 20 years. The recent survey we launched was as a sense check so we could check in with our Black Asian and Minority Ethnic communities and get their insight and experiences on the matter.

We regularly take input from our network and lead on initiatives such as the British Asians in Sport and Physical Activity Advisory Board to promote inclusivity of British Asians in sport. As we are mindful of the barriers that BAME communities face when engaging with sport here in Britain.

40% of BAME participants said their experiences of local sport or leisure clubs had been a negative one in terms of the customer service received, compared to just 14% of White British (Sport and Recreation Alliance, May 2018). Two years on the issues still persists and the question everyone is asking is why?

The issue we are currently dealing with is a society that is systemically racist with sectors that are consciously and/or unconsciously systemically oppressive. What does it mean to be systemically oppressive? Systemic Oppression is when the laws of a place/body/sector create unequal treatment of a specific social identity group or groups. Is this an issue in the Sports sector? Yes. Our recent survey into BAME experiences of racism within the Sports sector found that 83% had experiences of racism in the sector and even provided examples reinforcing the clear and apparent oppression of BAME communities.
"A senior manager (on a Diversity Course) expressed his opinion that Black people have a "chip" on their shoulder. In his experience too many black people complain about how bad life is. I was appalled by his statements and poor examples. As the only BAME member of staff and relatively new I wanted to avoid confrontation and had to take some comfort in the fact that no one else verbally agreed." (Black Caribbean Male, 45-54) "Having applied for a post at a sporting National Governing Body I was denied the role after interview for South Asian Women's coordinator, the post was given to a white female, as no South Asian women had applied. I complained and received a reply of sorry it was human error." (Pakistani female, aged 45-54) "NGBs are well placed to make a difference, but sadly they are the ones in charge of their sports and decide how things will be. It is the same in England and wales to be honest. I cannot speak for Scotland. Institutional racism amongst most NGBs is a huge concern and I have coached across many sports for almost 20 years, at all levels and by view can be backed up with robust evidence and examples." (Male BAME coach)
These are direct quotes from our open survey on Racism in the Sports Sector and it clearly highlights issues around systemic racism and oppression. There are engrained attitudes in this sector that privilege and prefer white communities over BAME. With potentially 95% of senior management, board members and the workforce being white, we truly wonder how even at a basic physical activity level BAME viewpoints are acknowledged or taken into consideration. There needs to be an encouraged, embraced and enforced disruption of the current state of play within this sector.

We need the sector to commit to changes in culture, policies and practice - once these changes have been implemented, measured and maintained; only then will we see tangible change. We encourage anyone from BAME communities to contact us with their experiences of racism within the Sports sector by answering and sharing our survey. We will continue to advocate for change, supporting BAME communities and their allies until the change is achieved and maintained. - Arun Kang OBE, CEO Sporting Equals

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The issue of racism in sport is not new to us, our organisation has been advocating and campaigning for racial equality for over 20 years. The recent survey we launched was as a sense check so we could check in with our Black Asian and Minority Ethnic communities and get their insight and experiences on the matter.

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Top Ten Tips on Managing Difficult Conversations

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Anti-Racist Praxis in Closeto-Practice Research (Cole, 2019)

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Anti-Racist Praxis in Closeto-Practice Research (Cole, 2019)

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A 2015 commentary in the American Journal of Public Health defines racism as a "system of structuring opportunity and assigning value based on race that unfairly disadvantages some individuals and communities". In other words, racism is deeper than the outwardly facing vile acts one person commits to another. The various ways that our societal structures have made life less equitable for some than others have been uncovered in great depth in recent weeks. We discussed this in broad strokes in our recent blog "Social Determinants of Health: How Privilege Affects Health Outcomes" . It's no secret that healthcare in the United States is far from innocent in that regard and many experts in the field are doing what they can to bring about positive change. In fact, the same commentary in 2015 admits that "public health, at its core, is antiracist work."

As deep as we would like to go on this topic, we want to specifically point out the ways that our profession has contributed to the inequitable access to physical therapy for Black people in this country. Similar to our approach with patients and clients, before we can fix a problem we must identify the contributors to it.

Representation
Representation involves using people or symbols as a stand-in to be the voice of familiarity for others. According to 2018 statistics, only 3.67% of the 249,500 physical therapists surveyed were Black. Asians made up the second largest group at 12.9% and Whites were the largest group at 80.4%. As far as the educational data is concerned, the Physical Therapy Centralized Application Service (PTCAS) reported that only 6.14% of the 18,359 physical therapy school applicants in 2018 were Black.

This discrepancy in representation at the professional level undoubtedly plays a part in why Blacks are also underrepresented in physical therapy school applicants each year - one is less likely to pursue a career if they have not seen someone from their community in that position before. Representation is a crucial factor in healthcare as patients need providers who can empathize and understand them on a deeper level. Often, that understanding starts with having a similar skin tone.

The fact is, we need more Black physical therapists in healthcare. Race, pain, and pain management
A 2016 National Health Interview Survey found that Blacks had the second highest prevalence rates of chronic pain at 17.9% of the population. Despite that, the more common methods of pain management available to the general public are either underutilized by Blacks or are just not as accessible by the Black community.

An analysis spanning from 1979-2010 showed that while Blacks died at a higher rate from opioid and heroin usage in 1979, by 2010 the White community and the Black community had reversed roles to where Whites were twice as likely to be given a prescription to opioids than Blacks. Some have questioned whether this silver lining is due to a combination of marketing tactics by pharmaceutical companies targeting rural White communities and a lack of health insurance and routine healthcare visits to doctors in Black communities. A study done in 2016 also showed that medical trainees had an underlying bias towards Black patients that they may feel less pain due to a perceived thickness of their skin. While it is unlikely that this particular belief is actually being taught in medical schools, anyone who has worked in medicine and healthcare can tell you that tradition and long-held, unsubstantiated beliefs run rampant in clinical training.

Physical therapy utilization
A 2017 study found that Hispanic and Black Americans are 26.5% and 44.8% less likely to attend at least one physical therapy office visit in a year for self-reported arthritic conditions, respectively. In other words, there is a much higher chance if you are White that you will attend a physical therapy clinic for arthritis related pain in a given year. Now, there are some obvious shortcomings of a study like this from our perspective but it does highlight that by and large most patients in outpatient physical therapy are White. Here is a list of possible reasons why this might be:

Lack of Black representation in physical therapy providers. Again, this is important because patients are most likely to seek out providers that they can immediately relate to. For example, most athletes want to work with therapists that were or are currently participating in sports themselves.
Fewer routine visits to primary care providers by Blacks likely contributes to fewer physical therapy referrals in states where doctor referrals are required.
Blacks and Hispanics continue to be the two most uninsured races, despite increases in insurance rates from the Affordable Care Act.
Physical therapy clinics tend to be in communities of affluence with nuclear family stability, higher household incomes, and higher rates of insured residents. Other healthcare considerations
While not directly related to outpatient physical therapy, Black Americans also suffer from higher rates of hypertension, nutrition deficiencies, and chronic stress. While these issues are the result of multiple layers of issues, the fact of the matter is that healthcare by and large is a great contributor to the racial disparities and inequities in our country. The system of healthcare functions on tiers of access and privileges. As a result, the people that comprise the system are assigned a value based on those tiers.

Our position is that healthcare as a whole needs to change from the inside out. If we can't truly provide care for all of our citizens then calling it "healthcare" seems rather contradictory in our opinion.
Law LF, Sluka KA. How does physical activity modulate pain?. Pain. 2017;158(3):369-370. doi:10.1097/j.pain.0000000000000792

Armstrong K, Ravenell KL, McMurphy S, Putt M. Racial/ethnic differences in physician distrust in the United States. Am J Public Health. 2007;97(7):1283-1289. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2005.080762

Kelly M. Hoffman, Sophie Trawalter, Jordan R. Axt, M. Norman Oliver
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Apr 2016, 113 (16) 4296-4301; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1516047113

https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/how-we-fail-black-patients-pain

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. September 14, 2018. Vol 67, No. 36: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/wr/pdfs/mm6736a2-H.pdf

Keeney T, Jette AM, Freedman VA, Cabral H. Racial Differences in Patterns of Use of Rehabilitation Services for Adults Aged 65 and Older. J Am Geriatr Soc. 2017;65(12):2707-2712. doi:10.1111/jgs.15136

Physical Therapy Centralized Application Service 2017-2018 Applicant Data Report: http://www.ptcas.org/uploadedFiles/PTCASorg/About_PTCAS/PTCASApplicantDataRpt.pdf

Virtual Mentor. 2013;15(5):449-454. doi: 10.1001/virtualmentor.2013.15.5.pfor1-1305.

Zheng P, Kao MC, Karayannis NV, Smuck M. Stagnant Physical Therapy Referral Rates Alongside Rising Opioid Prescription Rates in Patients With Low Back Pain in the United States 1997-2010. Spine (Phila Pa 1976). 2017;42(9):670-674. doi:10.1097/BRS.0000000000001875

Hollingshead NA, et al. Impact of Race and Sex on Pain Management by Medical Trainees: A Mixed Methods Pilot Study of Decision Making and Awareness of Influence. Pain Medicine. 2015;16(2):280-290.

https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/01/15/black-americans-pain-opioids-racial-bias https://datausa.io/profile/soc/physical-therapists#demographics Stephanie K Carter, John A Rizzo, Use of Outpatient Physical Therapy Services by People With Musculoskeletal Conditions, Physical Therapy, Volume 87, Issue 5, 1 May 2007, Pages 497-512, https://doi.org/10.2522/ptj.20050218

Sandstrom R, Bruns A. Disparities in Access to Outpatient Rehabilitation Therapy for African Americans with Arthritis. J Racial Ethn Health Disparities. 2017;4(4):599-606. doi:10.1007/s40615-016-0263-7

https://www.kff.org/disparities-policy/issue-brief/changes-in-health-coverage-by-race-and-ethnicity-since-the-aca-2010-2018/ https://www.kff.org/uninsured/state-indicator/rate-by-raceethnicity/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/usc-brookings-schaeffer-on-health-policy/2020/02/19/there-are-clear-race-based-inequalities-in-health-insurance-and-health-outcomes/ Alexander MJ, Kiang MV, Barbieri M. Trends in Black and White Opioid Mortality in the United States, 1979-2015 [published correction appears in Epidemiology. 2019 Mar;30(2):e13]. Epidemiology. 2018;29(5):707-715. doi:10.1097/EDE.0000000000000858

https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/01/03/bias-opioid-prescribing-black-americans https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4504294/pdf/AJPH.2015.302706.pdf

Armstrong S, Wong CA, Perrin E, Page S, Sibley L, Skinner A. Association of Physical Activity With Income, Race/Ethnicity, and Sex Among Adolescents and Young Adults in the United States: Findings From the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 2007-2016. JAMA Pediatr. 2018;172(8):732-740. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2018.1273

Kingsbury JH, Buxton OM, Emmons KM. Sleep and its Relationship to Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Cardiovascular Disease. Curr Cardiovasc Risk Rep. 2013;7(5):10.1007/s12170-013-0330-0. doi:10.1007/s12170-013-0330-0

Bahr PR. Race and nutrition: an investigation of Black-White differences in health-related nutritional behaviours. Sociol Health Illn. 2007;29(6):831-856. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9566.2007.01049.x

https://www.apa.org/topics/health-disparities/fact-sheet-stress

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Racial Disparities in Physical Therapy - Headquarters Physical Therapy

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For this article, we at Headquarters Physical Therapy took a hard look in the mirror at our own industry and how it has failed to contribute to an equitable landscape for all people. This article looks at what the racial disparities are and what has contributed to them.

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A study published by JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) in 2016 found a positive correlation between income and life expectancy with a 14.6% difference in life expectancy between the richest 1% and the poorest 1% of the population (Chetty et al, 2016). Another study done in 2017 found a 17% mortality risk and a 48% disability risk in the lowest wealth quintile in the United States versus a 5% mortality and 15% disability risk in the highest wealth quintile. Without even getting into the various contributors as to why these findings are the way they are, it is clear that simply being poor is a threat to your health (Makaroun et al, 2017).

Multiple studies have also come to similar conclusions regarding chronic illnesses such as heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease, and obesity (just to name a few): social determinants such as poverty and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) increase the risk of chronic disease throughout one's lifespan (Cockerham, et al 2017; Sonu et al 2019).

So how did we get here? Why is it that the underprivileged and under resourced tend to experience harsher health outcomes just because of where they live and what their annual income is? The answer is that there is no clear cut answer. This is a multifaceted and extremely complex issue and we will do our best to highlight some of the broader contributors to what the World Health Organization believes to be a necessity throughout the globe.
Resources
All six of the categories mentioned in Figure 1 have some tie in with the challenges that those in underprivileged communities have when it comes to accessing resources that would be beneficial for one's health. When one thinks about community healthcare resources the first thought is usually whether or not that neighborhood has a hospital. However, many other physical resources are often lacking in underserved communities that play a factor in one's ability to maintain proper health. Some examples are as follows:

Grocery stores with affordable and healthy goods - grocery stores typically operate on very thin profit margins. This forces smaller food stores in lower income neighborhoods to primarily stock foods with longer shelf lives (often high in calories and preservatives) while increasing prices on fresh items. We speak of the basic need of adequate caloric consumption in athletes. The lack of sufficient caloric intake is a real issue in underserved communities.

Availability of physical activity programs for youth- schools in underserved areas often have smaller budgets for sports and afterschool programs and many families in these communities are unable to afford what programs do exist.

Jobs that provide adequate health benefits and wage standards that allow time for routine medical visits - working multiple jobs, working for low hourly wages, difficulty accessing healthcare providers, and lack of health insurance all contribute to the fact that those in underprivileged communities tend to schedule fewer routine visits and are less likely to trust and adhere to recommendations given by healthcare providers (Cockerham et al, 2017). Medical care is expensive enough for those with sufficient coverage. Suffice it to say that the costs can be insurmountable for those with lower household incomes.
Education
Navigating the healthcare system, understanding pharmacological instructions, and regular preventative measures all seem to be impacted by lower education levels. For example, the Commission on Social Determinants of Health found that those in the lowest economic quintile were less likely to receive their full schedule of immunizations. Many medical professionals argue that one of the most important, and life-saving, actions one can take in extending their life expectancy and overall health outcomes is to receive their full vaccination schedule.

It doesn't take too much digging around to realize that education levels and earning potential are correlated and we have already discussed how income levels and health outcomes are related.
Stress and Social Support
An underlying social determinant that is not talked about as often is the chronically elevated stress related to living with less. From concerns of living paycheck to paycheck, the possibility of catastrophic events without an adequate savings, threats of violence from police or others in the community, and down to the stress of living in inadequate housing situations, chronically elevated stress levels due to these circumstances can have lasting effects on cardiovascular health as well as mental health.

We spoke earlier about ACEs and their impact on one's likelihood to develop chronic disease in their lifetime. When assessing one's ACEs score the subject is usually given a questionnaire to respond to. The sections of the questionnaire ask questions about various types of abuse from psychological, physical, and sexual abuse. It also asks questions about the social structure of the child's life: whether a parent was ever neglectful, whether both parents were in the house, and whether or not they had ever considered being adopted by different couples. The worse off your score is the more likely you are to develop a chronic disease later in life.
Why does this all matter?
As we repeatedly discuss health in a holistic and individualized fashion, we cannot deny the importance of advocating for improved health possibilities on a macro level between and within communities. This is particularly true for the black community, as data also suggest that the black community tends to suffer from increased chronic disease and lower life expectancies consistently. Even during the current global pandemic it has been repeatedly shown that black people have been disproportionately affected with worse outcomes and recovery rates. This has also impacted the black community economically as well as almost half of African Americans are struggling to pay their monthly bills due to the virus whether due to job loss or medical expenses ( https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/perspective/coronavirus-unequal-economic-toll/ ).
A word to our fellow healthcare providers
As we continue to provide care based on our patients' individual needs as opposed to the diagnosis in their medical charts, it is important to remember that we are not all playing with the same deck of cards. Many of our patients will not have the access, the trust, or the understanding to carry out the plan of care we develop with them. Nonetheless, it remains our responsibility to be their advocate regardless and find ways to instill incremental change however that may look.

So when we interact with a patient, particularly one with a different background, are we listening to them and not just hearing them? Are we approaching them with empathy? Are we more eager to learn than we are to teach? Sit with your patients, ask questions about them as a person and not just questions about their injuries, and try to see how they may be affected by things outside of their control.

We admit that we are guilty of turning a blind eye to this issue and our implicit contribution to the challenges posed by social determinants of health. We make no excuses for that and hope that we, as those who swear to do no harm, truly live by that oath for each person that steps foot into our clinics.

HealthAffairs. Health, Income, & Poverty: Where We Are & What Could Help. 2018

( https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hpb20180817.901935/full/#:~:text=The%20United%20States%20has%20among,in%20poor%20or%20fair%20health. )

Kaiser Family Foundation. Beyond Health Care: The Role of Social Determinants in Promoting Health and Health Equity. 2018

( https://www.kff.org/disparities-policy/issue-brief/beyond-health-care-the-role-of-social-determinants-in-promoting-health-and-health-equity/ )

Kaiser Family Foundation. Communities of Color at Higher Risk for Health and Economic Challenges due to COVID-19. 2020

( https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/communities-of-color-at-higher-risk-for-health-and-economic-challenges-due-to-covid-19/ )

NEJM Catalyst. Social Determinants of Health (SDOH). 2017

( https://catalyst.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/CAT.17.0312 )

Chetty R, Stepner M, Abraham S, et al. The Association Between Income and Life Expectancy in the United States, 2001-2014. JAMA. 2016;315(16):1750-1766. doi:10.1001/jama.2016.4226

Cockerham WC, et al. The Social Determinants of Chronic Disease. Am J Prev Med 2017; 52(1S1):S5-S12

Ottersen OP, Dasgupta J, Blouin C, et al. The political origins of health inequity: prospects for change. Lancet. 2014;383(9917):630‐667. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(13)62407-1

Marmot M, Friel S, Bell R, et al. Closing Closing the gap in a generation: health equity through action on the social determinants of health. The Lancet; Volume 372, Issue 9650 , 8-14 November 2008, Pages 1661-1669

Sonu S, Post S, Feinglass J. Adverse childhood experiences and the onset of chronic disease in young adulthood. Preventive Medicine 2019: 163-170

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Social Determinants of Health: How Privilege Impacts Health Outcomes - Headquarters Physical Therapy

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At Headquarters Physical Therapy we agree with the epidemiologists that claim that public health is largely influenced by socioeconomic factors. Before we can attempt to make significant change we need to acknowledge how we got here, what the impact is, and what truly needs to change in order for u

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Equality, Diversity and Racism in the Workplace: A Qualitative Analysis of the 2015 Race at Work Survey

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Equality, Diversity and Racism in the Workplace: A Qualitative Analysis of the 2015 Race at Work Survey

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Why the concept of 'race' is misleading in a biological/genetic context and is not a real biological/genetic term

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Why the concept of 'race' is misleading in a biological/genetic context and is not a real biological/genetic term

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Over the past year CLASS have been working in collaboration with ASO Communications on the Race-Class Narrative project, which captured the values and experiences of diverse working class people up and down the country. Through our research we have developed a new narrative that builds solidarity across race and class to inoculate against the powerful few seeking to divide us, and win progressive change. Utilising the methodology of phenomenally successful Race Class Narrative project in the US, this project responds to the way dog-whistle racism is used by the hard right (but also some parts of the left and centre) to create a divisive, "anti-woke" narrative of the 'white working-class' being 'left behind' while people of colour and migrants are showered with unfair advantages. We find ourselves in a situation where the right articulates and builds this coherent narrative of ethnonationalism, and progressives do little more than publicly object to this story.

CLASS's one-year project is funded by our supporting unions, including NEU, ASLEF, BFAWU, CWU, GFTU, GMB, NUM, NUT, PCS, TSSA, UCU and Unite the Union. We were also supported by the Robert Bosch Foundation, Unbound, Barrow Cadbury Fund. And to those who are supporting the next phase of the research: Barrow Cadbury Fund, Guerilla Foundation, People's Action, and Marlene Englehorn.

The narrative is built from the grassroots, listening to multi-ethnic working-class communities through focus groups and interviews - especially those with intersectional experiences - and building a new set of frames, real-life stories and metaphors.

The project aims to produce novel research that unifies and empowers diverse working-class communities through a narrative-led approach. Our new messages are empirically tested against current mainstream messaging for efficacy and persuasiveness, using the innovative method of dial testing. Together, this research will generate a new story to shift the discourse and support for our headline policy recommendations including: ​
Using the RCN Framework
Our research with 2200 subjects demonstrates the potency of the RCN narrative framework (already proven in the US by the original Race Class Narrative project and ongoing research and implementation) which uses the following core structure:

1. Value: Open with a shared value that explicitly includes people across lines of race and economic status, to build cross-racial solidarity.

2. Problem. Narrate the problem & locate this problem in certain powerful actors. Be specific about what they are doing and how it harms us.

3. Solution. Emphasise how collective action helps us address the problem and implement the solutions that benefit us all. Communicate an aspirational vision, being specific about the outcomes we can achieve by joining together

Using Best Messaging Practices
The report lays out a range of best messaging practices to ensure we can create maximum impact when we are talking about the issues that affect working class people's lives

Tell a complete story using the RCN framework: lead with an inclusive value, then narrate the problem, naming the actors and motive, and how and who is harmed, and close with a solution embedded in a call to come together across our differences.

Lead with shared values, not problems: narratives that start with shared values have proven much more effective at shifting opinions toward progressive policy solutions. It engages people's better selves - who they aspire to be - as they confront the rest of the message. Moreover, it begins a message by establishing the fundamental things most of us have in common - essential for countering divisive narratives.

Talk about people: In order to effectively mobilize people to take action, it is critical to name the people in power who are genuinely responsible and why they are causing the problem. We must juxtapose the handful of extremely wealthy and powerful people who make decisions against our common interests with the many of us who can overcome barriers and implement solutions through collective action.

Avoid negation: Decades of research demonstrates that attempts to refute false information can actually strengthen people's belief in the claims. Testing shows that people remember the assertion and forget that it's a lie. Instead, use the opportunity to present your own story in regards to the topic of the conversation, while calling out divide and rule tactics and their motive without repeating the lie itself.

Be explicit about the groups who are scapegoated and harmed. Always use clear, direct and people-centred language such as "Black and brown people", "people seeking asylum" and "people left struggling to make ends meet." For example, talk about "families left struggling to make ends meet" rather than "poverty" or "the poor". Talk about 'Black and brown people' rather than 'minorities'.

Be explicit about ethnicity and race. We need to actively talk about race and ethnicity in our messages in order to reflect and celebrate the intersectionality of working-class people. We must name groups of us who might otherwise be silently excluded and are often the targets of racial scapegoating (e.g. ethnic minorities, Muslims, people seeking asylum). And we must make our position on racism clear. Our base is deeply concerned about racism, and persuadables are more likely to believe that 'talking about race is necessary for us to move toward greater equality' (50%) than 'continuing to address race is harmful as it only creates division' (37%). Moreover, explicit reference to race engages people of colour while keeping white listeners on board - as it disarms our opponents from being able to suggest that advocates do not care about white people.

Create something good, don't merely oppose something bad. We must stand for something desirable not merely against something deplorable. When it comes to describing our policy objectives, we tend to employ the language of "fixing" or "reforming," or "improving" which suppresses motivation and long-term engagement. Instead, describing the good thing your policy, campaign or movement exists to create helps sustain the will to fight among your base and engenders interest among sceptics. Also, a "no" without a "yes" leads listeners to think we're just playing politics as usual. It sounds like we're just denouncing whatever the other side puts out to defeat them, not making a sincere attempt to see good policy become law.

How to talk about policies?

To bring about a better, fairer and more compassionate society, we need more than just a good story. Policies are vital. However, without the political will to enact them, we need to build public support and pressure our leaders to make them a reality. We strongly recommend that when making a case for policies they are:

Embedded as part of the call to action and solution in a complete RCN story. Start with the shared value that pertains to your solution, then narrate who/what/why is stopping us from making that value a reality, and only then put forward a call to action i.e., 'when we come together across our differences' followed by the solution 'secure green jobs, good education, and a better future for all of us, our children and our grandchildren.'

Talk about the outcome of policies rather than the details of policies. For example, "people are paid enough to make ends meet" and "you're at your new baby's side," rather than "minimum wage increase" and "paid family leave". Any policy is only as good as what it allows you to do. These are the terms and experiences that make things human issues, not policy debates.

Use clear, explicit, simple and people-centred language, instead of jargon. We want to ensure our message is memorable and shareable, using unnecessarily complex language makes this goal less likely.

Use examples of unity and winning to overcome cynicism: Other research finds that referencing previous cross-racial (and/or class, nationality, gender) solidarity helps abate cynicism and increase the desire to engage. We need better examples of solidarity to demonstrate that change is possible when people come together across race and class.

Use the rule of three. When we are talking about groups of people or lists of desired outcomes and solutions, our messaging is strongest when we are specific and indicate the range we need with lists of three (e.g. "Whatever our skin colour, gender or where we come from"). Longer lists are difficult for audiences to process and they can make any omissions feel more obvious. The rule of three allows us to cover diversity in a way that is memorable to our audiences.

Use words that work

Working class

Black, white and brown working class

Diverse working class

Families left struggling to make ends meet

People seeking asylum

Working-class people whether we are Black, white or brown

No matter our skin colour

Ethnic minorities

Certain politicians, their billionaire friends and the media they own...harm / blame / spread lies

Certain politicians, their billionaire friends and the media they own are fuelling damage to our climate, selling off our NHS and slashing youth centres and schools

They are robbing people of a decent wage and refusing to contribute what they owe in tax

Certain politicians, their billionaire friends and the media they own blame (e.g. migrants & people seeking asylum) for the hardships the wealthy few created

ABC spread lies about (e.g. migrants) to distract us from how their decisions harm us all

With our voices and our votes, we can demand better

Secure green jobs, good education, lively highstreets, first rate care, etc.

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Over the past year CLASS have been working in collaboration with ASO Communications on the Race-Class Narrative project, which captured the values and experiences of diverse working class people up and down the country. Through our research we have developed a new narrative that builds solidarity across race and class to inoculate against the powerful few seeking to divide us, and win progressive change.

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The Truth about Britain, Nigeria and the environment

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The Truth about Britain, Nigeria and the environment

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We need to develop our approach to socially constructed concepts  in pain care and research

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We need to develop our approach to socially constructed concepts  in pain care and research

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The COVID-19 pandemic has made necropolitics - the politics of life and death - unavoidable . Drawing on the work of Achille Mbembe, Hamish Robertson and Joanne Travaglia argue that, as in previous crises, COVID-19 reveals many of the hidden assumptions underpinning national healthcare systems. As the current crisis continues to bring these assumptions into the mainstream and disrupts business as usual, they suggest that COVID-19 points towards opportunities to reshape the relationship of society to its most vulnerable members.

We are currently in a time of crisis, brought on by a historically familiar theme of viral infection, the scale of which is unprecedented in living memory. Thus, we are experiencing a global reaction to what has come to be seen (in the richer, healthier and increasingly older countries) as a 'black swan' event. Perhaps not surprisingly this event is occurring at a time when the rising threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has become a major issue for health care systems and providers globally. While AMR and COVID-19 present very different challenges, the distinction between actual and potential health events can be seen as a related part of the problem we are now experiencing - a lack of preparedness. This includes planning for, resourcing and anticipating future events that have both a recent (e.g. SARS) and longer historical record (e.g. The 1918 Influenza Epidemic). We have been here before, and yet at the social policy level there tends to be a denial, rather than acceptance, of history.

universal access can itself be critically unpacked and it is not the same thing as universal treatment or equal care within all parts of a healthcare system

This lack of preparedness in many countries is a reminder that decisions made and not made, such as what level of capacity our health systems should possess, are marked by political and ideological positions, rather than scientific knowledge. As Dye drily defined " Public policy is whatever governments choose to do or not to do ". In the USA much of the contemporary commentary suggests universal healthcare access is a major benefit for societies in a pandemic scenario. In principle the idea is that universal systems pre-empt many of the problems associated with for-profit systems, such as inability to pay for care when needed, prioritising some treatments (or payments) over others, and or waiting until illnesses are severe before seeking treatment. The basic logic is that universal healthcare enhances population-level health and creates a level of health reserve that may stall or moderate otherwise rapidly developing health crises.

However, universal access can itself be critically unpacked and it is not the same thing as universal treatment, or equal care within all parts of a healthcare system. Some groups continue to experience inequalities and inequities even in purportedly universal healthcare systems both before and during a crisis event. Because societies generally affirm various kinds of inequality on a daily basis, the consequences of a pandemic scenario for people whose lives are precarious, may be especially serious. We need only consider the risks experienced by those in institutional forms of 'care' including prisons, undocumented migrants, refugee or migrant holding facilities, and people with mental illnesses, through to residential aged care facilities and, of course, people who are homeless. The disability community in the United Kingdom is already talking about a potential genocide.

The hidden assumptions of healthcare systems

One of the more common philosophical positions of the health professions generally, and in a time of crisis, is a crude form of utilitarianism. This is implicit in the idea that medical decisions about access to and provision of treatments will be assessed on the basis of individual need, a 'need' that is frequently interpreted through a lens of both perceived social utility and a capacity for 'clinical benefit'. In other words, people who are already ill, have co-morbidities or disabilities may be less likely to receive care during crisis events such as a pandemic. In the United States there is, as usual, already a racial dimension to the Covid-19 morbidity and mortality statistics.

It is for these reasons that what we have often been seeing in the early stages of this crisis, is a repetition of entrenched ideas about, and attitudes towards, a variety of individuals and groups in the community. This is when and where we see remarks about who needs to survive and who does not, where we see public discourse deploy terms such as 'herd immunity' without direct acknowledgement that such ideas, and their implementation, carry enormous mortal risks for specific groups of people and, by inference, their families and supports. This, following the work of Mbembe, can be interpreted and inquired on as a form of necropolitics.

Necropolitics and COVID-19

Mbembe's 2003 conceptualisation of necropolitics, exercised via techniques of necropower, focused on the state's right to decide who may live and who must die (our emphasis) as the "ultimate expression of sovereignty". This clearly has resonance under the current circumstances in which governments and political functionaries are making comments that suggest some lives may be (are) more important than others. However, in a crisis it is not always the state that chooses to make the decisions about life and death. As in previous crises, such as Hurricane Katrina, individuals in acute situations may make decisions not only to allow weak and vulnerable people to die, but to proactively end their lives. Already we have seen cases in Spain of the abandonment of older people to their fates in residential care facilities.

COVID-19 has highlighted in an extraordinary way many of contemporary society's necropolitical assumptions

Our concern here is that these patterns of behaviour are not even remotely unique to crisis situations (would that they were), instead they are a consequence of how people living in highly dependent and vulnerable living situations are frequently characterised and summarily dismissed. As feminist bioethicists have argued, capitalist systems in general, and neoliberal ones in particular, have a deep antipathy towards dependent people and even to the very concept on relational dependency, hence the poor pay and conditions associated with commodified care work. The concept of commodification is deeply entrenched in our healthcare systems, since so few of them are resourced to the level of actual population health need. Instead we see both implicit and explicit narratives about the need to ration resources, which in the final account means the rationing of treatment and care.

The necropolitical moment

COVID-19 has highlighted in an extraordinary way many of contemporary society's necropolitical assumptions. These issues are pushed to the side when things are progressing 'normally' and institutional forms of power hold sway, leaving limited room for negotiation. Now is the time to engage more actively with our societies' necropolitical assumptions, because as existing orthodoxies are destabilised, it creates openings to understand and reimagine our own necropolitics

Clearly the global situation is volatile, and it is still unclear how long it will endure. Our proposal here is to consider the discourses, both 'business as usual' and those of exception, from a necropolitical perspective. Clearly some people are more at risk than others, clearly people who were vulnerable before are even more so now. Some of that vulnerability is a consequence not of their individual or social health categorisation ( the elderly, the disabled, the chronically ill), but due to our prevailing necropolitics and unexamined positions in respect of those necropolitical arrangements. COVID-19 compels us all to inquire very closely on these arrangements, the political challenge of the post COVID-19 world will be to seize this necropolitical moment,before the situation returns to those established relationships and assumptions - until the next crisis event.

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The Necropolitics of COVID-19: Will the COVID-19 pandemic reshape national healthcare systems?

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The COVID-19 pandemic has made necropolitics - the politics of life and death - unavoidable . Drawing on the work of Achille Mbembe, Hamish Robertson and Joanne Travaglia argue that, as in previous crises, COVID-19 reveals many of the hidden assumptions underpinning national healthcare systems. As the current crisis continues to bring these assumptions into the mainstream and disrupts business as usual, they suggest that COVID-19 points towards opportunities to reshape the relationship of society to its most vulnerable members.

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"As an employer and a leading voice in global medicine and health, we strongly oppose racism and support racial equality because more equal societies are healthier societies."
Chris Jones, Chief Executive Officer, BMJ

In this insightful episode of the BMJ Podcast, Chief executive of the NHS Confederation and Professor Mala Rao joins us to discuss the NHS Race and Health Observatory's central mission and how it will maintain independence, its role in synthesising, commissioning and implementing research, and where the organisation might begin in tackling the issue.

Listen here

In February 2020 The BMJ published a themed issue in Racism on Medicine which was guest-edited by Victor Adebowale and Mala Rao. It aimed to highlight the discrimination and health inequalities related to race and ethnicity experienced by patients and doctors. The issue was a great success and led to the launch of the Race and Health Observatory in May.

We said that we wanted the Racism in Medicine issue to be the start of a conversation and wider coverage in the journal of the problems that face patients and doctors from black and ethnic minority backgrounds. This mission has become even more important since the covid-19 pandemic struck and highlighted that racism is a public health issue. It is the aim of The BMJ to continue highlighting new developments, research, and reports to our readers that helps to end racism in medicine and to provide our readers with regular updates on the topics explored in the themed issue.

How do we start a conversation about racism in medicine? | The BMJ Opinion | "Tackling racism in medicine can only come about with honest conversations." Christine Ekechi suggests we can start that journey in three ways.

"Ethnic minority patients experience differential outcomes in healthcare. Maternity and infant mortality are stark examples, but there is also evidence of differences relating to race in cancer survival, life expectancy, and diabetes care. These were among the issues we thought could be aired and debated in a special themed issue.

We wanted this themed issue to be the start of wider coverage in the journal of the issues that affect people from ethnic minority backgrounds. We want it to be an ongoing conversation about how to tackle racism in the NHS and medicine more generally and how to make everyone's lives better by improving the environment for ethnic minority doctors and patients.

It is an issue that affects us all, and we can all play a part in reducing the disparities and inequalities faced by patients and doctors," writes Zosia Kmietowicz, The BMJ news editor. Read more...

Victor Adebowale and Mala Rao (pictured) called for an observatory to tackle the ethnic health inequalities in the UK in a special issue of The BMJ that they co-edited in February. NHS England confirmed at the end of the May that the centre would go ahead.

NHS launches Race and Health Observatory after BMJ's call to end inequalities | "A new NHS centre to investigate the effects of race and ethnicity on people's health has got the go ahead after a special issue of The BMJ in February focused on the continuing problem of racism in medicine," writes Zosia Kmietowicz.

New observatory will set out actions to tackle racism "within months," say campaigners | "The architects behind the new NHS Race and Health Observatory have vowed that it will deliver actionable recommendations within months to tackle the structural racism that exists throughout healthcare," writes Zosia Kmietowicz

The NHS Race and Health Observatory-its time has come | "The Observatory will seek to achieve not only equality of access to services, but equal health outcomes irrespective of race," write Mala Rao,professor, Department of Primary care and Public Health, Imperial College London, London, and Victor Adebowale, chair of NHS Confederation, London.

The Observatory will be launching an interactive digital platform, designed to provide public access to data on health inequalities across the country

People are confident in the Observatory as an independent health body; which guarantees objectivity of research, recommendations and in implementation support

The Observatory's recent review has been commended for representing lived experiences of patients and staff, linking structural racism to poor health outcomes.

NHS Race and Health Observatory to stage first international conference | The NHS Race and Health Observatory will stage its first international conference on race, racism, and health later this year. The inaugural event, which is being supported by The BMJ, will take place virtually on 7 and 8 July 2022.

| NHS England has guaranteed funding for NHS Race and Health Observatory funding is renewed for five years News | the NHS Race and Health Observatory until at least 2027, which was announced at the observatory's first international conference on race, racism, and health at BMA House in London on 8 July.

NHS Race and Health Observatory conference: leaders give their views | News | International experts and senior healthcare leaders, Victor Adebowale, Yvonne Coghill, Tinuke Awe and Clotilde Abe give their view on crucial changes needed in health education over the next five years and beyond, to create for inclusive and equal healthcare for all.

Race, racism, and health: global learning for national action | Editorials | David R Williams, Yvonne Coghill, Kamran Abbasi and Habib Naqvi shed light on the global reach of the Race and Health Observatory's work and research, and its commitment to collaborating globally to identify cross cultural commonalities; integral to reducing health inequalities for ethnic minority and majority on a global-scale.

NHS Race and Health Observatory appoints global experts on inequalities to its board | News | Gareth Lacobucci writes on the world's leading experts on health inequalities, recently added to the Race and Health Observatory's board of non‐executive directors.

Now is the time for radical action on racial health inequalities | Opinion | Mohammad S Razai , Doug McKechnie , Mala Rao and Azeem Majeed call for urgent and large-scale action needed to stamp out rampant inequalities in the medical sector, and how the recent NHS Race and Health Observatory review highlighting the true depths of inequities within health services, is just the start of changes needed.

Racial health inequality is stark and requires concerted action, says review | News | "For too many years the health of people from ethnic minorities has been negatively affected by a lack of appropriate NHS treatment for health problems, poor quality or discriminatory treatment from healthcare staff, missing data on ethnic monitoring; and a lack of appropriate interpreting services, the report said." Jacqui Wise writes on key findings and conclusions of the Race and Health Observatory's recent review.

Covid-19: Racism may be linked to ethnic minorities' raised death risk, says PHE | "Racism, discrimination, and social inequality may have contributed to the increased risk of death from covid-19 among ethnic minority groups, a review commissioned by the government has acknowledged," writes Gareth lacobucci .

Covid-19: PHE review has failed ethnic minorities, leaders tell BMJ | "A government review promised to discover why covid-19 has a disproportionate effect on people from ethnic minorities, but advocacy groups say their input was ignored," Gareth lacobucci hears.

Covid-19: Government will belatedly publish recommendations for protecting ethnic minorities | "The UK government will belatedly publish recommendations for protecting minority ethnic groups from covid-19, amid claims that parliament was misled about the existence of additional material produced alongside a much criticised review by Public Health England (PHE)," writes Gareth lacobucci.

Ending US health inequalities needs multiple approaches, panel says | "Deaths from covid-19 among black Americans are almost double those of whites, and black, brown, and indigenous people face structural racism and health inequalities, an expert panel has said," writes Adrian O'Dowd.

New observatory will set out actions to tackle racism "within months," say campaigners | "The architects behind the new NHS Race and Health Observatory have vowed that it will deliver actionable recommendations within months to tackle the structural racism that exists throughout healthcare," writes Zosia Kmietowicz.

NHS blood unit is "systemically racist" and "psychologically unsafe," investigation finds | "An independent investigation into working conditions at a unit of the NHS's blood and organ transplant service has concluded that it is "systemically racist" and "psychologically unsafe,"" writes Gareth lacobucci.

All diversity is not created equal | "The hard truth is that while all physicians from ethnic minorities may experience discrimination, it doesn't always look the same," says Arundhati Dhara, Assistant Professor at Dalhousie University in the Department of Family Medicine.

| A BMJ investigation finds that medical schools are failing to monitor racial harassment and abuse of ethnic minority students, Are medical schools turning a blind eye to racism? Zosia Kmietowicz reports.

Do Black Lives Matter in the NHS? | The BMJ Opinion | "Without analysing Blackness specifically, we cannot understand or defeat the anti-blackness that exists in the NHS," says Sahar Abdulrahman.

The conversation on race, covid-19, and #BLM matters more than ever | The BMJ Opinion | Discussing racism, inequality, and the impact this has on our health has crashed into the mainstream; but it's a conversation that is getting confusing, particularly for those who have never needed to invest in understanding these issues. We need to get the conversations right, says Keerti Gedela.

My experiences of racism: five minutes with . . . Zana Khan | The London GP talks about her personal experiences of racism, and the need to be bold in tackling racism and discrimination in the NHS

Ethnic minority doctors are less likely to gain consultant posts, survey finds | Doctors from ethnic minority groups have to apply for many more consultant posts than white doctors to secure a job, a survey of applicants' experiences from 2018 by the Royal College of Physicians of London has found.

Black babies are less likely to die when cared for by black doctors, US study finds | Black newborn babies who are cared for by black doctors are more likely to survive than those cared for by white doctors, reports Elisabeth Mahase.

New indicators will track doctors' careers to expose racism | NHS England has launched a new set of indicators to expose ethnic disparities in the medical workforce, with data set to be presented to trusts later this year, reports Elisabeth Mahase.

Presenting clinical features on darker skin: five minutes with . . . Malone Mukwende | The medical student who created a handbook presenting clinical features on darker skin describes the ambition behind it

Articles from BMJ Journals

The critical role of the NHS Race and Health Observatory | BMJ Leader | Habib Naqvi, Marie Gabriel and Victor Adebowale explore the ground-breaking establishment of an independent health body such as the Race and Health Observatory, and the cruciality of its research and recommendations in helping build a healthcare system based on equality, and with it, the potential of a more equal and united country as a whole.

Student perspectives on barriers to performance for black and minority ethnic graduate-entry medical students: a qualitative study in a West Midlands medical school | BMJ Open | Nariell Morrison, Michelle Machado and Clare Blackburn explore graduate-entry medical students experiences of undergraduate training in the context of academic underperformance of medical students from ethnic minority backgrounds.

Decomposition of the US black/white inequality in premature mortality, 2010-2015 | BMJ Open | Decomposing the US black and white inequality in premature mortality into shared and group-specific risks to better inform health policy: an observational study by Mathew V Kiang, Nancy Krieger, Caroline O Buckee, Jukka Pekka Onnela, Jarvis T Chen.

BMJ Learning modules
Create a free account to access BMJ Learning's professional development modules
Preventing bullying and harassment | Learn how to identify when behaviour is bullying or harassment. It will also help you reflect on what is needed to create a working environment in which people feel respected and able to work to the best of their ability.

Diversity leads to better research

#PublishingEquality | In June, 2020, as a company we united with our fellow publishers to make research publishing more inclusive and diverse. We signed an agreement to take a proactive stance against bias, as we commit to working together to better reflect the diversity of their communities and to remove barriers for under-represented groups.

The joint agreement impacts scholarly publishing on a global scale, having been initiated by the Royal Society of Chemistry and signed by the American Chemical Society (ACS), BMJ, Cambridge University Press, the Company of Biologists, Emerald Publishing, Elsevier, Hindawi, IOP Publishing, Oxford University Press and the Royal Society. We are also engaging with more publishers to form a working group to collaborate on further actions to improve inclusion and diversity in publishing.

"Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. "
Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, editor and professor (1931-2019)

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Supporting equality and fighting racism for a healthier world

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"As an employer and a leading voice in global medicine and health, we strongly oppose racism and support racial equality because more equal societies are healthier societies."

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More than 120,000 workers quit jobs because of racism, UK study suggests

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More than 120,000 workers from minority ethnic backgrounds have quit their jobs because of racism, suggests a landmark study that has found workplace discrimination is sapping the confidence of a large part of the UK workforce.

More than one in four workers from black and other minority ethnic backgrounds have faced racist jokes at work in the last five years and 35% said it left them feeling less confident at work, according to what is believed to be the largest representative survey conducted of the UK's 3.9 million minority ethnic workers. Eight per cent of victims left their job as a result of the racism they experienced, according to the study by the Trades Union Congress.

"Many told us they experienced racist bullying, harassment - and worse," said the TUC general secretary, Frances O'Grady. "And alarmingly, the vast majority did not report this to their employer ... Ministers need to change the law so that employers are responsible for protecting their workers and preventing racism at work."

One black Caribbean lecturer in the south-west of England told researchers: "I drive a nice car and one member of staff asked me if I was a drug dealer, because how else could I afford [it]?" When she reported the incident she was told ​​"it's because of the area of the country we live in, which is predominantly white".

A British Indian woman from London, who was told she was overlooked for a job because the company didn't want front-facing staff wearing "funny clothes", said she had never reported a racist incident because she was afraid she would lose her job. The survey found only 19% of those who had experienced harassment reported the most recent incident to their employer. Almost half feared it would not be taken seriously.

Dr Halima Begum, the chief executive of the Runnymede Trust, a race equality thinktank, said the findings showed many employers lacked "accountable structures supporting employees to report racist incidents".

"Without adequate action from employers the pervasiveness of racism mounts, and it's this lack of accountability which tips any single accusation within a workplace from an individual 'bad apple' to an institutional problem."

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, which represents human resources professionals, said the 1,750-person survey was a "stark reminder that far too many black and minority ethnic workers still face discrimination in the workplace on a regular basis". It said the findings should provide fresh impetus for the government to introduce mandatory ethnicity pay reporting.

Examples of racism given in focus groups ranged from children asking a teacher with a non-British accent where she is from, to people being told to "go back to your country". Workers aged 18 to 24 were significantly more likely to say they had experienced racism than older workers.

"This data shows there is still a way to go in addressing racial and ethnic equality across society," said Matthew Percival, the director for skills and inclusion at the Confederation of British Industry, which represents employers. "Businesses must be doing all they can to build an inclusive workplace and tackle discrimination."

The CBI is urging businesses to commit to ethnicity pay gap reporting and clear targets for improving representation at board and senior leadership levels.

A government spokesperson said: "Our inclusive Britain action plan sets out plans to build a fairer and more inclusive society, including promoting fairness in the workplace and action to tackle the ethnicity pay gap."

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More than 120,000 workers quit jobs because of racism, UK study suggests

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Survey finds more than a quarter of minority ethnic workers have faced racist jokes in last five years

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Whiteness - some help with the terminology

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Whiteness - some help with the terminology

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I regularly talk about social justice to friends and family (but sadly not my nan, anymore. And by sadly I don't mean she has passed away, I mean she remains a staunch racist despite my efforts).

I also talk to colleagues involved in all areas of education from library staff and lecturers, to senior leaders and support and cleaning services (one of my priorities in my personal and professional life is to hold myself and others to account in our efforts to fight racism and dismantle white supremacy).

When the topic of race equity comes up, people are often unsure of what I mean when I refer to 'whiteness'. Thanks, National Curriculum. This is because the system is not-so-cleverly designed to disguise itself. Some people I talk to know far, far more about it than me (unsurprisingly, not my nan). Anyway, here's an infographic that might help us understand whiteness as key in perpetuating white supremacy. Free PDF available by request @Cole_Therapy_Ed.

Did I just say 'white supremacy'? Yes. Yes, I did. This brief blog represents my current, developmental understanding of 'whiteness'. But to understand whiteness, one must understand 'white supremacy'.

White supremacy refers to a racially hierarchical system - legally, culturally, economically, and politically - where white people occupy the majority of power positions. But it is not just about these white persons. It is much, much more than that. It is the seen and unseen power dynamics and norms that helped them to those positions and continues to do so (see white privilege). So if there were more Global Majority people in those positions things would be ok, right? Wrong. Because it's not just about white skin, or even just about white privilege either. Unless the structures, processes and behaviours manifested as 'whiteness' are dismantled, not much will change at all. Systemic racism will continue.

White supremacy names the system of (t o draw upon Ruth Gilmore) the unchecked production and exploitation of white-differentiated vulnerability to inequities, including morbidity and mortality.

There are certain ways of living within this system that sustains it. These ways of being - our attitudes and behaviours - are the working parts of the system as a whole. This is our whiteness. When someone tweets that the system is broken because Black people are murdered by the police, or that Black people are disproportionately incarcerated, they are erroneous. For this is in fact proof that the system is working precisely as intended.

Here's a handy infographic summarising key terms when talking about racism.

Whiteness is hard to summarise because it is shifting and shifty, not always tangible, and often only evidenced by what it leaves in its wake. This is why it is so pernicious. It has been said to be many things, from a shifting paradigm of unspoken norms and values, to a set of unearned advantages and complicity in oppressive systems; to property, rights, and a state of mind. For a body of work that illuminates the legacy of colonialism in the racism of British society, see, for example, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, and Ambalavaner Sivanandan.

Whiteness is not the same as (limited to, or a co-requisite of) 'white' skin. As James Baldwin said, " white people are imagined", and it is this imagination, this social construction, inextricable from the material, political and cultural history of imperialism, slavery, and colonialism in producing white supremacist capitalism, that manifests in unarguable material and metaphysical violence, oppression and inequity for people racialised as other-than-'white'. I say 'unarguable', because the data is there. As W.E.B Du Bois inferred, you cannot pretend it isn't:

So, whiteness can be conceived as individual thoughts, beliefs and actions. But to stop there would be folly, because whiteness is also collectively performed and behaved by institutional and national policies and practices.

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I regularly talk about social justice to friends and family (but sadly not my nan, anymore. And by sadly I don't mean she has passed away, I mean she remains a staunch racist despite my efforts).

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The Runnymede Trust | Confronting Injustice: Racism and the Environmental Emergency

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The Runnymede Trust | Confronting Injustice: Racism and the Environmental Emergency

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Systemic racism and environmental injustice are two sides of the same coin - we can’t tackle one without tackling the other.

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Playing in the Dark: a key source for the development of Whiteness studies

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Playing in the Dark: a key source for the development of Whiteness studies

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How does literary utterance arrange itself when it tries to imagine an Africanist other?

What are the signs, the codes, the literary strategies designed to accommodate this encounter? What does the inclusion of Africans or African-Americans do to and for the work?

As a reader my assumption had always been that nothing "happens": Africans and their descendants were not, in any sense that matters, there; and when they were there, they were decorative - displays of the agile writer's technical expertise.

I assumed that since the author was not black, the appearance of African characters or narrative or idiom in a work could never be about anything other than the "normal", unracialized, illusory white world that provided the fictional backdrop. Certainly no American text of the sort I am discussing was ever written for black people - no more than Uncle Tom's Cabin was written for Uncle Tom to read or be persuaded by.

As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer. The fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious.

It is an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity. It requires hard work not to see this.

It is as if I had been looking at a fishbowl - the glide and flick of the golden scales, the green tip, the bolt of white careening back from the gills; the castles at the bottom, surrounded by pebbles and tiny, intricate fronds of green; the barely disturbed water, the flecks of waste and food, the tranquil bubbles traveling to the surface - and suddenly I saw the bowl, the structure that transparently (and invisibly) permits the ordered life it contains to exist in the larger world.

In other words, I began to rely on my knowledge of how books got written, how language arrives; my sense of how and why writers abandon or take on certain aspects of their project.

I began to rely on my understanding of what the linguistic struggle requires of writers and what they make of the surprise that is the inevitable concomitant of the act of creation.

What became transparent were the self-evident ways that Americans choose to talk about themselves through and within a sometimes allegorical, sometimes metaphorical, but always choked representation of an Africanist presence.
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: whiteness and the literary imagination. Harvard University Press, 1992, pp.16-17

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Toni Morrison on Whiteness as a 'goldfish bowl'

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How does literary utterance arrange itself when it tries to imagine an Africanist other? What are the signs, the codes, the literary strategies designed to accommodate this encounter? What does the inclusion of Africans or African-Americans do to and for the work?

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The necropolitics of COVID-19: Race, class and slow death in an ongoing pandemic

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The necropolitics of COVID-19: Race, class and slow death in an ongoing pandemic

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ABSTRACT
Achille Mbembe states that 'the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die [...]. To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power' (Mbembe, 2003. Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1), 11-40. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11). For Mbembe a key question is 'under what practical conditions is the right to kill, to allow to live, or to expose to death exercised?' (Mbembe, 2003. Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1), 11-40. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11). This article will map the necropolitical underpinnings of racial and class-based health disparities and vulnerabilities in the current COVID-19 pandemic. The article will directly engage with the question of 'under what practical conditions are the right to expose to death' unfolding in the current COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on news media representations and public health data in the UK and the U.S, the article will provide a disciplinary conjecture arguing for the importance of looking at what I call a 'state of acceptance' plays into the necropolitical dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Introduction

The current COVID-19 pandemic has, by January 2021, caused more than 86 million confirmed cases globally, and more than 1.8 million deaths across the world. While the pandemic is a global crisis, recent perspectives have shown that the pandemic is not a 'great equalizer' (Bowleg, ; Marmot & Allen, ) i.e. that it affects everyone equally in society. First, the mortality rate for COVID-19 increases dramatically with age, thus the elderly and those with underlying co-morbidities are disproportionality at risk of severe disease outcome or even death. Secondly, ethnic and racialized minorities seem to be affected harder both in terms of rates of infections and in terms of mortality (Khunti et al., ; Tai et al., ). This article aims to establish a disciplinary conjecture by extending Achille Mbembe's framework of necropolitics. It will primarily focus on Mbembe's work (Mbembe, , ) and tease out what this concept can teach us about how health disparities and the COVID-19 pandemic has produced conditions not for living but for dying. This extension will argue that conditions of slow death and necropolitical outcomes are themselves not only the outcomes of a form of 'state of exception' but rather through what we can call a 'state of acceptance'. If the exceptional state of emergency that Mbembe draws upon to elaborate on the necropolitics of the war on terror or the colonial plantation, then this conjecture states that the necropolitics of global health inequality is driven not by a perpetual state of emergency, but by a state of chronic acceptance that some have poorer health than others.

This conjecture will be built first through a comprehensive literature review of scholarship on both necropolitics, state of exception (Agamben, ), slow violence (Nixon, ), and precarious life as it has been developed by Judith Butler (Butler, , ). Secondly, since the aim of the article is primarily to make a disciplinary conjecture, it will foreground theory while using epidemiological data as well as examples from media discourses as a way of making the conjecture. As such, the media analysis conducted in this article is not a systematic analysis of media coverage of COVID-19 and its necropolitical impacts, rather the media discourses will act as examples intended to highlight the conjecture made in this article. Finally, the article will be focusing on the disproportional effect that COVID-19 has had on ethnic minority communities. More specifically, the article will focus on BAME (black, Asian, and middle eastern) communities in the UK by referencing epidemiological data as well as using online news media discourses as exemplars of how necropolitics and the state of acceptance fuel this disproportional impact of the pandemic.

Christopher Lee has made some observations that I will lead with to set the stage for my conjecture. Lee states that Mbembe's framework of necropolitics might allow us to better analyze the current situation by focusing on how

neoliberal northern democracies such as Britain and the United States [are] facing a distinct challenge in responding from years of austerity and the privatization of medical care, neither should the opportunity be lost to think differently about what is at stake. COVID-19 isn't simply a medical or epidemiological crisis; it is a crisis of sovereignty. (Lee, )

Part of the necropolitical regime of health care is that certain health care systems have created an environment not conducive to life but to slow death, in particular amongst some of its population. The COVID-19 pandemic has 'highlighted a long-term failure among some states to sustain public health, to sustain life, through their commitment to neoliberal agendas to end state welfare in favor of privatization' (Lee, ). The processes of privatisation, neoliberalism, and the fragmentation of state welfare, have created conditions where 'slow death' is an omnipresent danger. In terms of the current COVID-19 pandemic, the

necropower dynamics of COVID-19 and other epidemics, whether Ebola or HIV, are of slow violence. After decades of reduced infrastructure for medical care in many countries, whether through limited medical facilities in rural areas or through the sheer scarcity of life-saving hospital equipment witnessed now, national governments cannot guarantee or even administer life, except through the crudest forms of non-medical state control and cold violence against non-citizens as cited earlier. (Lee, )

Lee's point is crucial for my argument: the crisis narrative that has dominated much news coverage in the U.S, UK, and much of Europe, should not just be seen as an epidemiological crisis but a crisis of sovereignty. I want to highlight that the deployment of crisis is often as Berlant states,

a distorting or misdirecting gesture that aspires to make an environmental phenomenon appear suddenly as an event because as a structural or predictable condition it has not engendered the kinds of historic action we associate with the heroic agency a crisis seems to already to have called for. (Berlant, , p. 760)

This links to my point: the COVID-19 pandemic is entangled with necropolitical factors of slow violence and death that preceded the pandemic and adds to the disproportional distribution of vulnerabilities towards the risk of infection, death, and economic impoverishment. Secondly, Berlent's point also underlines the fact that a crisis often calls for action while an endemic situation of health disparities becomes a state of acceptance. Necropolitics is often 'chronic' and slow, yet its influence on people's lives often comes to the fore when an abrupt crisis emerges such as COVID-19. However, and much like Mbembe and Agamben, Lee says little about the connection that necropolitics has to the affective dimension of acceptance. While I take inspiration from Lee's focus on structures of underfunding, neglect of welfare schemes, and the privatisation of health care, I argue that we need to highlight how necropolitics is also linked to a state of acceptance.

Building up the conjecture: Towards a theory of 'a state of acceptance'

In building the conjecture of a state of acceptance, Mbembe's work on necropolitics is at the heart of my argument. It should be noted that my concept of a state of acceptance could be linked to such concepts as epistemic violence (Spivak, ); symbolic violence (Bourdieu, ); gendered violence (Pain, ); colonial violence (Fanon, ); normalised violence (Bourgois, ); banal violence (Yusoff, ); everyday violence (Lockhart, ; Scheper-Hughes, ); social detriments of health (Marmot & Wilkinson, ); slow death (Berlant, ); racial capitalism (Bhattacharyya, ; Melamed, ); and violent inaction (Davies et al., ). Each of these tries to unpack different ways of understanding the term violence and how it is embedded in different social, cultural, economic, legal, and political frameworks. However, it is beyond the scope of this article to articulate how a state of acceptance relates to the terms above, and as such, the focus will be to develop acceptability as a term that plays on but also stands in contrast to, the state of emergency as it figures in Agamben and Mbembe.

Necropolitics

As is well known by now, Mbembe's concept of necropolitics is an extension of Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics (Foucault, , , ). It also relies heavily on the work of Georgio Agamben and his work on homo sacre and the idea of a 'state of exception' which in turn is derived in part from Carl Schmitt (Agamben, , ; Schmitt, ). In Mbembe's analysis, the right to 'make' live and 'let' die in Foucault's analysis (Foucault, ) needed another focal point. This focal point rests in the sovereign's power not only to 'let die' but indeed to expose people, including a country's citizens, to conditions so detrimental to health that people will ultimately die (Mbembe, ). The cases Mbembe draws upon are slavery, colonisation and the colony, apartheid in South Africa, and the 'War on Terror', all to show how necropower takes hold of various bodies and exposes them to conditions that make life highly precarious. Mbembe seeks to investigate 'under what practical conditions is the right to kill, to allow to live, or to expose to death exercised?' (Mbembe, , p. 12). The primary focus here is precisely how conditions of death and disease are created in such a way that particular groups and communities are relegated to zones of living that are not life-giving but conditions of slow death. A central question for Mbembe is 'What place is given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)? How are they inscribed in the order of power?' (Mbembe, ). We might want to add here 'what place is given to the sick and infirmed body', the body that has been and continues to be exposed to conditions of slow death either through poverty, detrimental working conditions, nutrition, and pollution (Davies, )? My argument is that necropolitics should fix its gaze on the everyday death-worlds created by health inequality and the conditions that foster ill-health and premature deaths across the globe. It is through a chronic state of acceptance that necropolitical conditions are allowed to continue exciting and thus creating zones wherein people are exposed to conditions not conducive to living but 'slow death'.

From a state of exception to slow violence and slow death

Crucial to Mbembe's project to develop necropolitics is how Mbembe draws upon a notion of the state of exception. The state of exception has often been discussed in relation to the Nazi regime, totalitarianism, and the death camps (Agamben, , ; Mbembe, , p. 67). The death camps of the Nazi's have been highlighted as the ultimate expression of power in the negative, indeed it is here that Agamben for instance, finds the best example of the suspension of law and how it turns into a permanent spatial arrangement wherein the camp's inhabitants remain forever outside the law's normal state (Agamben, ). The state of exception is defined as a 'special condition in which the juridical order is acutely suspended due to an emergency or a serious crisis threatening the state' (Giordanengo, , p. 1). In this situation, the sovereign prevails over all others and basic laws and norms can be violated by the state under the ongoing crisis. For Agamben this has obvious biopolitical consequences: since the state of exception is a state of exceptionalism, such suspensions of legal rights and norms not only affect people as political subjects or citizens but as human beings as such (Giordanengo, , p. 2). Key here is how the bodies of certain subjects are divested of the right of legal protection and the protective shield of social norms, exemplified in Agamben's use of the figure of homo sacer (Agamben, ). Such subjects are reduced to a state that Agamben calls 'bare life', which entails that the sovereign has complete power over homo sacer. This means that the authority the sovereign has over the subject which has been reduced to bare life, is not only power understood as power over the citizen of the state' but indeed to the point of acting upon his/her own natural life and in the process depriving the individual with the right to live (Agamben, ). Agamben's and Mbembe's use of the state of exception allows for two things: on the one hand, it demarcates a form of temporality wherein exceptional suspension of legal and normative rights are done. On the other hand, this allows for such states of exception to carve up space into what Mbembe has called 'zones of slow death'. These spaces are not only the concentration camps of the Nazis, but as Mbembe states, these can be extrapolated to include the plantation, the detention centres used in the 'War on Terror', or the colony and the colonial zoning practices of different colonial powers (Mbembe, ). However, Agamben and to a lesser degree, Mbembe, focus all too little on the role played by society and less exceptional mechanisms for how zones of death and dying are produced (Giordanengo, , p. 5). I conjecture that we need to pay more attention to the mundane, the economic, and the cultural to better understand how pandemics and health disparities are the results of a necropolitics that is not only a state of exception but rather a state of acceptance. This leads me to draw on Rob Nixon's term of slow violence.

Slow violence can be defined as 'a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all' (Nixon, , p. 2). Right away we can note some of the differences between Agamben and Mbembe's focus on violence: where Agamben and Mbembe focus on a state of exception and a very visible form of violence (particularly the death camps of the Nazis' or the zoning of imperial colonies), slow violence focuses much more on the gradual, the less visible and dispersed forms of violence. Whereas necropolitics and the state of expectation as temporal concepts focus on the event, the crisis, and the suspension of the law and norms, slow violence focuses on the drawn-out, time-delayed, everyday violence. As Davies states, slow violence demands of us that we unchain our analytical gaze from the present and direct our gaze towards the past, towards the 'violent structures of inequality that saturate contemporary life, and may lay waste to the future' (Davies, , p. 2). As spatial concepts, necropolitics and Agamben's state of exception focuses on zones of 'bare life', on highly regulated and clear spaces such as the colony, the death camp, the zoning of apartheid, and the plantation (Agamben, ; Mbembe, , ). Conversely, slow violence focuses on 'the gradual deaths, destruction and layered deposits of uneven social brutalities within the geographic here-and-now' (Davies, , p. 2). Slow violence is 'violence that occurs gradually and out of sight; a delayed destruction often dispersed across time and space' (Nixon, , p. 2). This form of violence, often exemplified by cases that deal with environmental issues such as toxic waste, climate change, or species loss, is less clearly bounded spatially than necropolitics and Agamben's state of exception. Indeed, where Agamben sees the state of exception as anchored in a narrative of crisis, and Mbembe sees necropolitics as embedded in a form of biopolitics which suspends legal and moral norms often through highly racialized imaginaries, Nixon's slow violence 'insists we take seriously forms of violence that have, over time, become unmoored from their original causes' (Davies, , p. 2). Slow violence offers us a way of thinking past the extraordinary, past the moment of political crisis, and past the issue of a sovereign since it is much more attuned to thinking in terms of the delayed, the hidden, the mundane, and the slow nature of violence. This delay and slowness can be reflected in Lauren Berlant's concept of slow death (Berlant, ). For Berlant, slow death implies shifting focus away from 'traumatic events' to looking at temporal environments located in the ordinary, in the everyday activities of needs, desires, and the horizons of the taken-for-granted issue of everyday living and dying (Berlant, , p. 759). This once again aligns itself with both the conceptualisation of Davies on slow violence and my argument about the state of acceptance: the slow and steady violence and death zones created every day rely on an affective mode of expecting and accepting that certain people and communities will die and suffer. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has shown that while the 'event' and crisis narrative of the pandemic is important, it is the underlying health disparities that have fostered so much extra suffering and deaths. These underlying issues are endemic rather than epidemic in nature and as Berlant states, slow death belongs to the temporalities of the endemic (Berlant, , p. 756). I will argue that necropolitics alongside slow violence and slow death, clearly shows that the COVID-19 pandemic entangles, on the one hand, the crisis of a newly emerging infectious disease, and on the other hand, the endemic health disparities further are exacerbated by a state of acceptance.

Precarious life and acceptability

Judith Butler has provided a highly illuminating perspective that can be extrapolated to the issues described in the above through her work in Precarious Life (Butler, ) and in Frames of War. When is Life Grievable? (Butler, ). I argue that the philosophy of precarious life and the question of when life can be grieved is highly apt in the context of COVID-19 and the state of acceptance. In Precarious Life, Butler states: 'the question that preoccupies me in the light of recent global violence is, who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, what makes for a griveable life?' (Butler, , p. 20, italics original). These questions offer us an obvious parallel to Mbembe's questions of

In following this line of questioning, my line of argument is 'under what conditions do we accept that some lives will end and other lives will be saved under a pandemic? What kind of power structures allows certain lives to be conceptualized as acceptable deaths?'

If certain lives are more grivable than others, it is because we have come to accept that certain lives in certain situations will be exposed to the necropolitical condition of slow violence and death. Butler states that these questions revolve around the framing of which lives count as livable, and thus also griveable (Butler, , pp. 6-12). For Butler, this is a question that can be answered by attuning to how

Read in another manner, I argue that this process of inscribing who is grievable and who is not, has to do with a state of acceptance: whom we count as grievable is deeply entangled with how we have come to accept that certain lives will be more vulnerable and more likely to have ill-health and even die prematurely. For Butler 'we all live with this particular vulnerability, a vulnerability to the other that is part of bodily life [...] This vulnerability, however, becomes highly exacerbated under certain social and political conditions' (Butler, , p. 29). The key point here is that we need to start to think about the political and social conditions that make certain bodies more vulnerable to this fundamental vulnerability. Certain lives are more protected than others and some lives are less grievable than others as can be discerned from for instance how few 'deaths from AIDS were publicly grivable losses at the beginning of the AIDS pandemic or the extensive deaths now taking place in Africa are, in the media, for the most part, unmarkable and ungriveable' (Butler, , p. 35). My argument is that this is connected to a state of acceptance. A case in point would be Steven Epstein's work on the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. Here the early deaths of gay men from AIDS were in news discourses often highlighted through recourse to a hedonistic 'lifestyle' and promiscuity (Epstein, ). As such, due to the entanglement between stigma, homophobia, and rhetoric of lifestyle 'choices', these deaths were not only less griveable but indeed it was accepted that they would die. Butler is attentive to the unequal distribution of precariousness and precarity that is the result of 'a differential field of power and, specifically, the differential operation of norms of recognition' (Butler, , p. 44). As such, and this can be linked to necropolitics, "social and political organization of the world has led to a historical development wherein some lives are more precarious than others, often articulated through the political notion of 'precarity" (Butler, , p. 3). This implies an analysis that is not only attentive to a form of internal drive to live or to survive but that 'the possibility of being sustained relies fundamentally on social and political conditions' (Butler, , p. 21). Conversely, we need an analysis of how we have come to accept that certain lives live more precarious and are more vulnerable.

What the COVID-19 pandemic makes us see: The conditions of racialized necropolitics and health inequality

In June 2020, several articles in the UK press were published wherein the topic was the disproportional impact of COVID-19 upon black, Asian, and middle eastern (BAME) communities were addressed. The framing of the disproportional impact that COVID-19 has had upon BAME populations has ranged from biological factors, pre-existing health conditions, overcrowded housing situations, and socio-economic status. A case in point would be an article from The Guardian with the headline 'Why does Covid-19 affect ethnic minorities so badly? It isn't to do with biology'. In it, the author puts inequality, discrimination, and socio-economic differences at the heart of why COVID-19 has affected BAME communities harder. Two other articles, also published in June, one by the BBC and the other by The Independent followed suit. The BBC article was titled ' Why are more people from BAME backgrounds dying from coronavirus?' In the article, we once again see how in the media, factors such as pre-existing health conditions, overcrowded households, and socio-economic factors, were highlighted as part of the ongoing impact of COVID-19 upon BAME communities. This was also echoed in the article published in The Independent. Here the title reads 'Coronavirus tracked: How Covid-19 deaths in the UK compare by race and ethnicity' and the subsequent subtitle stated 'huge disparities in the health of our nation'. The point of referencing the public media landscape here lies in how the many conditions that underlie ethnic and racialized disparities within the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic are present in the news media and not just in epidemiological data. It also clearly illustrates the necropolitical conditions of the current pandemic. While many of the factors contributing to increased risk of infection and in turn higher prevalence of more severe COVID-19 cases do crop up in media discourses, my point is that while this is one important step on the way towards correcting these issues, few list the root cause of such structural issues. On this topic, I want to highlight an important insight from Judith Butler on the vulnerability that we all live with but which nevertheless is often distributed in such a way that certain communities are more vulnerable than others. Butler states 'we all live with this particular vulnerability, a vulnerability to the other that is part of bodily life [...] This vulnerability, however, becomes highly exacerbated under certain social and political conditions' (Butler, , p. 29). It is precisely these exacerbated vulnerabilities that I now turn to analyze some of the necropolitical underpinnings of the current COVID-19 pandemic and its impact upon racialized minorities of lower socio-economic backgrounds.

The necropolitics of risk of exposure: Housing, work, and social worlds

In the UK there has been a great deal of focus on the disproportional effect that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on black, Asian, and middle eastern communities (BAME). Indeed, Public Health England (PHE) has released two reports on the matter (Public Health England, , ) and the reports conclude that

The factors listed by PHE bespeaks of living conditions that align with the framework of necropolitics. The neglect and inaction in ensuring that BAME communities live in conditions conducive to good health and wellbeing stand in direct relationship to the ill-health and social inequalities that COVID-19 has unveiled for us.

Data from the Intensive Care National Audit and Research Center in the UK listed that as of September 25, 3,553 patients of 10,418 critically ill patients were of BAME background, thus comprising 33.91% of all critically ill patients (Intensive care national audit & research center, , p. 12). This is in contrast to the fact that ethnic minorities make up 14% of the UK population, clearly showing a vast overrepresentation in intensive care units in the UK. Data also shows that ethnic minorities receiving critical care in the UK are to a much higher degree suffering from multiple deprivations as measured by the 'index of multiple deprivations' (IMD). In the two quintiles showing the least deprivation, white patients in critical care were overrepresented while in the two quintiles showing most deprivation, ethnic minorities were overrepresented (Intensive care national audit & research center, , p. 13). Moreover, data shows that ethnic minorities were much more likely to be so ill that they needed mechanical ventilation (65.7% of all critically ill BAME versus 54.3% amongst white populations) (Intensive care national audit & research center, , p. 13).

How can we understand these figures concerning the overarching theory of necropolitics? First of all the key here lies in connecting these figures to the necropolitics of risk of infection and what Mbembe has highlighted as the 'power to expose' subjects to conditions of slow death. The emphasis here will be on how racialized minorities in the UK have to navigate living conditions and social worlds where they are more exposed to hazardous and in this case, infectious situations. I want to avoid here the invocation of a purely sovereign state as the agent of the 'power to expose to', a point that Berlant has made about the 'obesity epidemic' in the U.S and which Davies has made concerning the slow death of people living in zones of toxic environmental hazards (Berlant, ; Davies, ). Rather I want to highlight how racialized minorities have to navigate necropolitical conditions of health and wellbeing as the result of an assemblage of institutions, some of which belong to the state, while others are driven by corporate and private institutions and for-profit organisations. What I want to note here, is how the data above can provide a bridge between Mbembe and Butler. Butler states that

The above argument is testimony to a state of acceptance, i.e. that we have come to accept that racialized and socio-economic poorer communities live more precariously and are thus exposed more frequently to harmful living conditions and in this case, more susceptible to COVID-19 infections. To understand not only how underlying and pre-existing health conditions influence COVID-19 outcomes, but also to understand the risk of infection we need to turn an eye towards the broader social inequalities such as working conditions, living conditions, and social worlds, long structured by racial inequalities.

The impact of economic inequality also structures the risk of infection through how proximal one is to COVID-19. In particular when it comes to how certain occupations are more likely to be at the frontline when it comes to probable contact with COVID-19. The point here is not only to point out the risk of exposure to COVID-19 but also to link it to how proximity and precarious living in a pandemic is also about economic and material living conditions.

Being able to social distance is not just about following public health directives but is deeply connected to the intersection of income and unequal access to information(Norris, ) and attitudes towards risk(Yesuf & Bluffstone, ). Moreover, lower-income households are 'constraint in many ways, for example, in the capacity to work from home, take paid or unpaid time off of work, and draw on savings to limit shopping trips to meet basic needs' (Weill et al., , p. 19658). These factors add up and in total puts socio-economically poorer communities at heightened risk of COVID-19. Two issues, in particular, are at play here: the ability to take time off work and crowded housing conditions. First of all, in racialized poorer communities where people cannot take time off, risk exposure because of their relative risk in high-contact, high-risk occupations (i.e. frontline workers), but in particular those that rely on public transportation (Garcia et al., ). An article published by the Institute of Employment Rights noted that 'BAME women are twice as likely to be in low-paid work and occupations that expose them to a high risk of Covid-19 infection'. Moreover,

because workers in insecure jobs have fewer employment rights, it is much harder for them to access flexible working conditions that allow for childcare when nurseries are closed, and to self-isolate or shield due to a lack of adequate sick pay.

These socio-economic factors produce an environment akin to the necropolitical environments that expose certain people to vulnerabilities. However, this exposure is also the result of a state of acceptance wherein we, as a society, have come to accept the status quo. Explanations such as 'individual behaviors' and recourse to a neoliberal explanatory model based on 'rational actor theory' occludes the fact that structural factors such as the once described in the above force people to navigate as best they can condition of necropower. This is exacerbated by a societal state of acceptance wherein the slow violence of these conditions leads us to slowly but surely accept such living conditions.

Secondly, data shows that racialized and ethnic minorities in the UK to a much higher degree live in what is categorised as overcrowded housing conditions (Mikolai et al., ). In the UK, ethnic minorities have the highest rates of overcrowded households where 'the highest rates of overcrowding were in the Bangladeshi (24%), Pakistani (18%), Black African (16%), Arab (15%) and Mixed White and Black African (14%) ethnic groups'. Moreover,

White British households were less likely to be overcrowded than households from all other ethnic groups combined - this was across all socio-economic groups and age groups, most regions and income bands, and regardless of whether they owned or rented their home.

If we then also consider the fact that

Households with lower income are more likely to be overcrowded. In the bottom fifth of the income distribution, 8% of households are overcrowded. This is compared to 3% of households in the middle of the income distribution, and less than 1% of households in the top fifth,

it becomes clear that the political economy of structural violence wherein certain racialized and economically impoverished communities have been exposed to neglect and inaction puts them at an elevated risk of COVID-19 infections. In a different setting, Judith Butler has noted that 'there are ways of distributing vulnerability, differential forms of allocation that make some populations more subject to arbitrary violence than others' (Butler, , p. xii). However, we might here change Butler's focus on violence and rather highlight how structural issues and economic factors make certain communities more vulnerable than others, such as through housing, work, and access to material goods that might mitigate the risks of being exposed to COVID-19.

The necropolitics of Risk of severe disease: 'Pre-existing conditions' and ill-health

The CDC and the ECDC as well as the WHO have listed age as a factor onto itself to be a primary risk factor for death and severe disease outcome for COVID-19 yet they have also listed a set of other underlying or pre-existing conditions, which pose as a risk factor for disease outcome. In the UK, there has been a debate about whether or not underlying health conditions could explain COVID-19 mortality rates amongst BAME communities. A report published by Public Health England stated that some evidence suggested that 'some co-morbidities which increase the risk of poorer outcomes from COVID-19 are more common among certain ethnic groups'. The report then went on to list that 'people of Bangladeshi and Pakistani background have higher rates of cardiovascular disease' and that 'Black Caribbean and Black African ethnicity have higher rates of hypertension compared with other ethnic groups' and finally, that type 2 diabetes has a higher prevalence amongst BAME communities than amongst other ethnic groups.

However, the notion that ethnic and racialized minorities are at increased risk of severe COVID-19 disease outcome due to pre-existing conditions should be critically investigated as a product of slow violence and social inequality, and not as a blanket statement about 'lifestyle' diseases or as a black box for coming to grips with the death of racialized ethnic minorities. Indeed, Herrick states that

'in our new socially distanced world, those with NCDs are now classed - and class themselves - as 'vulnerable'. But this language erases the politics of that vulnerability - the genesis of the conditions themselves - and creates a flat earth in which NCDs themselves do not emerge, do not have a cause, but rather are always already existing. Perhaps most importantly, it also discounts the loss of life, as if mortality explained by virtue of the 'pre-existing' is somehow to be expected: a human tragedy but one that can be explained'. (Herrick, )

Herrick's insights into how we come to expect the loss of life when it has been categorised as having a 'preexisting condition' are apt in this setting. Not only does the label 'preexisting' render certain deaths to be expected, but also indeed, we have come to accept this. This is the subterfuge of necropolitics: it obscures the cause of the cause of chronic diseases and the politics of the conditions which create obesity, poor pulmonary health, hypertension, and vulnerabilities to COVID-19 are erased. Such erasure plays into how we come to accept that some communities have higher rates of 'pre-existing' medical conditions. Berlant notes that By looking at the interwoven structures between a pandemic on the one hand and the endemic disparities in health and economy, we can see that the current necropolitical outcomes of COVID-19 are not just the results of a state of exception. Rather, we expose what Berlant calls 'the muffled scene of living in ordinary consciousness which I call "a state of acceptance". By erasing the various social detriments affecting vulnerable communities' health, we come to more easily accept that some lives are more precarious and that the vulnerability that they have in the face of COVID is indeed a naturalised 'fact', something we have come to accept.

It is important to keep in mind how particular bodies are imagined as lesser than, and inferior to others and therefore regarded as disposable during a pandemic of the scale of COVID. In the rhetoric of COVID and its neoliberal focus on weighing the economy versus life, people in 'high contact, high risk' jobs are positioned as sacrifices to the relatively well-off and protected (Mcivor et al., ). In this framing, the necropolitics of COVID-19 is contingent upon what kind of job people have. From the U.S, we can read Jennifer Suggs, a Walmart cashier in New Orleans who says, 'We're not essential. We're sacrificial. I will be replaced if I die from this'. How we come to accept that certain people are at higher risk of infection and even death is also a question about how we come to value certain kinds of jobs, and certain kinds of communities. The underlying ableism and structural precariousness that structures the COVID-19 pandemic shows us that it is 'those who were already viewed as disposable even before the onset of the pandemic who are now falling ill and dying in disproportionate numbers' (Mcivor et al., ). Indeed while both in the U.S and the UK several professions have been labelled 'essential' through the term 'essential workers', the majority of whom are women, and women of colour, in particular, these jobs have long toiled through undervaluation and are underpaid as well as often lacking robust social security mechanisms. Another point has been how BAME communities are also disproportionally affected when it comes to the risk of severe COVID disease outcomes. Here as we have seen the label of 'underlying health condition' has served as a shorthand for erasing the structural issues that have created these conditions in the first place. This is also entangled with the notion of a state of acceptance, disposability, and a certain form of ableism.

A case in point here would be Toby Young's visceral opinion piece in The Critic, a conservative publication on the 31 March 2020. Young launched an attack on the now well-known COVID mitigation model provided by Neil Fergusson and the expert group at Imperial College (Ferguson et al., ). In the article, Young uses the quality-adjusted life-year (QALYs) established by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) and his calculations and concludes that 'the lockdown is extending the lives of 370,000 people by an average of less than one-and-a-half years' (Young, ). Moreover, with the Government's current price-per-life, each individual would have to live 11 years to make financial sense; even in this scenario, he argues, we're still over-valuing those lives since NICE would price those 11 years at £330,000, not £500,000 (Young, ).

Through this form of criticism of the lockdown in England, Young's understanding of health and the right to life is highly contingent upon a form of ableism wherein 'a good life' is equated with a life that is productive in the capitalist sense of the word. Through this analysis, Young singles out two groups of people as being 'less valuable': the elderly and those with underlying health conditions. Young concludes that

which underscores that those that deserve to be saved must be able to live a productive life. In Young's economic matrix, the good life is equated with capitalist production and thus his analysis forecloses the possibility that the elderly and those with underlying health conditions can be part of such a life. This is but one aspect of how certain bodies become marked as disposable and thus contributes to a state of acceptance wherein certain bodies (those that work in certain professions or those that are elderly or have underlying health issues) are marked as acceptable losses.

Conclusion

COVID-19 clearly shows and lays bare not only the intersecting issues of an emerging infectious disease and NCDs but also their social detriments and socio-political structures which in turn have created necropolitical conditions wherein certain communities are made more vulnerable and more precarious than others (Butler, , ). This vulnerability and precariousness are not just driven by material and socio-economic drivers, but like Butler's analysis of what lives are grievable shows, is driven by norms and cultural sentiments. I have tried to surface how necropolitics and the slow violence of COVID-19 are driven not just by a state of exception but are deeply connected to a state of acceptance. As such, I have tried to introduce a new optic between the necropolitics of Mbembe and the slow death of Nixon: a state of acceptance. In doing this I hope to have contributed to a more nuanced reading of necropolitics in global health. By drawing on slow death and slow violence, it is my argument that necropolitics needs to become more attuned to the mundane, the slow, and the chronic more so than the usual focus of necropolitics on the moment of crisis, the extraordinary, and those spaces that are marked as exceptional. The addition of slow death, slow violence, and a state of acceptance add just this: a focus on the slower tides of health inequality, the mundane yet chronic underfunding of health systems, as well as the slow violence brought about by marking certain bodies and jobs as disposable and thus their lives and bodies acceptable losses in a pandemic.

COVID-19 and how it has impacted BAME communities in the UK might seem like a crisis of epidemiology and of the sovereign power to protect its citizens, but as I have argued for in the above, the underlying structures which make these communities more vulnerable to COVID-19 should be seen as examples of necropolitics. By attuning to their slow and uneven distribution we can also start to make a conjecture about the role of a state of acceptance wherein the process of slow violence and ultimately slow death have come to be expected and accepted. A turn towards the affectual and affective motives for why we allow necropolitical conditions not only to emerge but to be sustained is called for to better understand precisely why some people are made to become more vulnerable and live in zones of precarious living.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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The necropolitics of COVID-19: Race, class and slow death in an ongoing pandemic

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ABSTRACT Achille Mbembe states that 'the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die [...]. To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power' (Mbembe, 2003.

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Ethnic Inequalities in Healthcare:A Rapid Evidence Review

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Ethnic Inequalities in Healthcare:A Rapid Evidence Review

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What is white privilege? 

We asked @JohnAmaechi, psychologist, best-selling author and former NBA basketball player to explain it for us.

👉 https://t.co/t7LIENTnPn

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Psychologist John Amaechi talks about white privilege.

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What is white privilege? 

We asked @JohnAmaechi, psychologist, best-selling author and former NBA basketball player to explain it for us.

👉 https://t.co/t7LIENTnPn https://t.co/mQrYX6Y0N1

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Don’t miss what’s happening

People on Twitter are the first to know.

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What is white privilege?

We asked @JohnAmaechi, psychologist, best-selling author and former NBA basketball player to explain it for us.

👉 https://t.co/t7LIENTnPn pic.twitter.com/mQrYX6Y0N1
— BBC Bitesize (@bbcbitesize) August 5, 2020

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Psychologist John Amaechi talks about white privilege.

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What is white privilege? 

We asked @JohnAmaechi, psychologist, best-selling author and former NBA basketball player to explain it for us.

👉 https://t.co/t7LIENTnPn https://t.co/mQrYX6Y0N1

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
What is white privilege? 

We asked @JohnAmaechi, psychologist, best-selling author and former NBA basketball player to explain it for us.

👉 https://t.co/t7LIENTnPn https://t.co/mQrYX6Y0N1

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
What is white privilege? 

We asked @JohnAmaechi, psychologist, best-selling author and former NBA basketball player to explain it for us.

👉 https://t.co/t7LIENTnPn

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Psychologist John Amaechi talks about white privilege.

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Home Office 'tried to bury' report exposing racism that led to Windrush, says journalist

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The Home Office "tried to bury" a report which showed that the Windrush scandal's origins lay in decades of racist immigration legislation, journalist Amelia Gentleman has told James O'Brien.

It has been reported that a leaked government report has concluded that the scandal's origins lay in decades of racist immigration law designed to reduce the UK's non-white population.

The 52-page analysis by an unnamed historian describes how "the British Empire depended on racist ideology in order to function" and sets out how this affected the laws passed in the postwar period, the Guardian has reported.

It has also been reported that the report concluded that the origins of the "deep-rooted racism of the Windrush scandal" lie in the fact that "during the period 1950-1981, every single piece of immigration or citizenship legislation was designed at least in part to reduce the number of people with black or brown skin who were permitted to live and work in the UK".

Speaking to journalist Amelia Gentleman, who broke the story, James said: "How come we have to rely upon you to find this out? Why hasn't it been published?"

In response, Mrs Gentleman said: "So that's what's the really, really peculiar thing about this report.

"It was commissioned two years ago by the Home Office...as part of a kind of self-eduction, self-awareness process. It was delivered by the historian a year ago, and it sat on a desk somewhere without being published internally for a year.

"And it's really, really peculiar. The findings of the report are very, very striking - are very hard-hitting. But probably immigration historians - anybody who studied 20th century history - will not be amazed by the findings.

"The thing that's really odd is that the Home Office tried to bury it."
READ MORE: READ MORE: Windrush victim: 'I had to pull my teeth out because I couldn't get NHS treatment'Windrush victim: I had more help from local supermarket staff than Home Office

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Home Office 'tried to bury' report exposing racism that led to Windrush, says journalist

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The Home Office "tried to bury" a report which showed that the Windrush scandal's origins lay in decades of racist immigration legislation, journalist Amelia Gentleman has told James O'Brien. It has been reported that a leaked government report has concluded that the scandal's origins lay in decades of racist immigration law designed to reduce the UK's non-white population.

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Whiteness is at the heart of racism in Britain - so why is it portrayed as a Black problem?

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In 2020, two police officers in Hackney strip-searched a 15-year-old Black girl at her school. Police conducted the search of this child, known as Child Q, without the consent of her parents, without an appropriate adult present (despite this being required by the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984), and with the knowledge that she was menstruating.

The subsequent safeguarding review, held in March 2022, concluded that "racism (whether deliberate or not) was likely to have been an influencing factor in the decision to undertake a strip search."

The fallout from the case of Child Q has followed a script that is all too familiar. Anti-racist campaigners have pointed to the incident as further evidence that racism remains a problem in contemporary Britain. Teachers at the school in question have expressed shock, reportedly claiming not to have known about the search. The Metropolitan Police has put the two officers directly involved on desk duty.

Each narrative, and each response, focuses squarely on Child Q and on the violence she suffered. There is a reason why this all seems so predictable. Discussions of racism in Britain centre around the experiences and traumas of Black people, but rarely on the perpetrators.

How we talk about racism

When we talk about incidents of racism, the focus - from both individuals and institutions - is often placed on the victim's behaviour or background.

British police have routinely justified using stop and search more often against ethnic minority groups by incorrectly claiming that crime and gang membership among these groups is higher. Research, however, shows that racial bias is at the root of this disproportionate use of stop and search: black people in Britain are nine times more likely to be affected than white people.

Similarly, discussions around the higher COVID death rates among minority groups puts disproportionate focus on the health problems (vitamin D deficiency, diabetes) in the affected population groups.

Research shows, however, that racism has been a fundamental cause. It explains why minority ethnic people were more likely to be in dangerous, frontline professions; unable to work from home; more likely to face unemployment and deprivation; and more likely to avoid contact with health professionals. Racism is multifaceted.

As writer and academic Gary Younge put it, "The virus does not discriminate on grounds of race. It didn't need to. Society had done that already."

How we respond to racism

When incidents of racism make the news, even activists and protesters emphasise, in response to each case, the victim's innocence and vulnerability. In other words, the victim becomes the whole story: Black people themselves are depicted as the source of racism. American sociologist WEB Du Bois identified this impossible situation in 1897 - over a century ago - when he asked, "How does it feel to be a problem?"

Left out of the discussion, every time, is whiteness. Black victims of racism are made hypervisible, while white perpetrators are kept invisible. There is power in this invisibility. Because white people are not racialised - they are seen as the default, and any other racial group is seen as "other" - their experiences are presented as those of individuals: race is not considered a factor in what they do.

When teachers referred Child Q to the police, they denied her the right to be taught and protected from harm. Instead, they treated her as a threat to other students, thereby effectively placing her outside of the educational institution. Research has highlighted how these institutions are characterised by whiteness, in terms of cohort racial makeup and the student experience and outcomes for people of colour.

When the police officers searched Child Q, they denied her the protections that the law guarantees to children. Instead, they treated her as a criminal adult. In the process, they drew, knowingly or not, from a long history of criminalising and dehumanising Black people for the (imagined) protection of white people.

They also engaged, as the safeguarding review noted, in adultification bias, wherein adults consider Black children to be older and less innocent than white children. Police leaders in Tower Hamlets and Hackney have since acknowledged as much.

Whiteness underpins racism. Ignoring whiteness perpetuates its violence. US writer Ijeoma Oluo made this point emphatically after the 2016 US presidential election. "White people," she wrote, "I don't want you to understand me better; I want you to understand yourselves. Your survival has never depended on your knowledge of white culture. In fact, it has required your ignorance." It is only by making whiteness visible that we can understand what leads to violence against Black people.

At the heart of racism is not the existence of Black people, but the active work of white institutions to maintain white supremacy. White supremacy is bigger than the sum of individual white people's actions.

At its most basic level, whiteness is a way of categorising people, humanising some by dehumanising others. This shapes the way that people exist in society and interact with institutions. It also helps to explain what happened to Child Q. Her statement is a harrowing reminder of how the maintenance of whiteness makes it impossible for Black people to simply exist. "I can't go a single day," she said, "without wanting to scream, shout, cry or just give up."

Understanding contemporary racism as the legacy of centuries-old colonialism and slavery may make it seem even more overwhelming. But recognising that whiteness is at the heart of racism can and should change our response. Opposing racism means working to overcome whiteness and reclaim humanity.

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Whiteness is at the heart of racism in Britain - so why is it portrayed as a Black problem?

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In 2020, two police officers in Hackney strip-searched a 15-year-old Black girl at her school. Police conducted the search of this child, known as Child Q, without the consent of her parents, without an appropriate adult present (despite this being required by the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984), and with the knowledge that she was menstruating.

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Critical Race Theory: The Facts and Irony (for White People) - শুদ্ধস্বর

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Critical Race Theory: The Facts and Irony (for White People)

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Critical Race Theory: The Facts and Irony (for White People)

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As nearly daily reporting in the U.S. highlights, the manufactured anger over Critical Race Theory (CRT) continues to influence directly and indirectly both public discourse as well as teaching and learning in U.S. schools. Books are being banned, and state legislation is restricting curriculum and teaching, often in response to outcries against the non-existent influence of CRT on education.

The anti-CRT movement is mostly a political movement grounded in misinformation. The essential misinformation includes how CRT is defined and the misunderstanding that CRT is taught in K-12 curriculum.

According to a report from UCLA's Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access:

We found that at least 894 school districts, enrolling 17,743,850 students, or 35% of all K-12 students in the United States, have been impacted by local anti "CRT" efforts. Our survey and interviews demonstrate how such restriction efforts have been experienced inside schools as well as districts. We found that both state action and local activity have left many educators afraid to do their work. (p. vi)

A key explanation in the report highlights the power of using "CRT" as misinformation:

We put "CRT" in quotation marks throughout this report because so often the conflict campaign's definition of "CRT" (like its description of actual K-12 practice) is a caricatured distortion by loud opponents as self-appointed "experts." The conflict campaign thrives on caricature - on often distorting altogether both scholarship and K-12 educators' efforts at accurate and inclusive education, deeming it (and particularly K-12 efforts to discuss the full scope of racism in our nation) wholly inappropriate for school. (p. vi)

The anti-CRT movement fits into, then, an ugly history of partisan politics, as Adam Laats details: "For a full century now, conservative politicians have attacked teachers to score easy political points."

While Republicans may win through state-level legislation, teachers, students, and universal public education certainly lose.
Caricature as Political Lie
Let me offer an analogy for understanding what CRT is and why "teaching CRT" is mostly a misrepresentation of the scholarly theory.

For scientists, particularly in the field of medicine, seeking ways to understand disease, an initial challenge was not being able to see microscopic viruses and bacteria. Scientist came to the conclusion that the illness being confronted could not be explained by the visible and misattributed causes of that disease and its transmission.

In other words, they needed a different way to see the disease. Enter the microscope, a tool for seeing differently in order to understand a complex phenomenon (a disease and its transmission).

CRT is the microscope; in short, CRT is a theoretical lens that scholars use to focus on race and racism as a tool for better understanding a phenomenon that traditional explanations have not adequately explained.

To clarify, then, CRT is a scholarly tool (a set of claims about race and racism) that helps examine phenomena, typically related to institutional dynamics (U.S. legal system, policing, public education). CRT has its origin in legal studies, and at its core, CRT examines phenomena under the assumption that racial inequities cannot often be understood by simplistic explanations such as individual racism.

As Adrienne Dixon explains, CRT does influence some elements of legal and educational scholarship:

CRT is a theoretical framework that originated in legal scholarship in the late 1980s. The founding CRT scholars were dissatisfied with anti-discrimination laws and the legal scholarship that informed it because they felt it didn't adequately address the role of race and racism and relied too heavily on incremental change. CRT was introduced to education in the 1990s to address similar dissatisfaction with research in education that scholars believed did not fully account for race and racism. Moreover, scholars felt that multicultural education had become co-opted and no longer had the potential to adequately address inequities in education writ large.

To clarify about the widespread misinformation about CRT, here are some key facts:

CRT is a theoretical lens used by scholars to understand phenomenon impacted by race; CRT is not taught in K-12 education (or undergraduate education), and may or may not have influenced any text or curriculum that addresses systemic racism.

CRT centers race in the spectrum of theories that fall under the label "CRT," and thus, since Marxism centers social class (and often takes a color-blind stance), CRT and Marxist theoretical lenses are in tension. In short, calling CRT "Marxist" is misleading at best, and simply false as worst. [1]

Very few students, even graduate students, are assigned readings and lessons that examine what CRT is and how to use it in research. Most students will only ever experience CRT examined formally in graduate courses (law school, graduate education), and even then, CRT remains mostly in elective courses. [2]

The Irony (for White People)
Now, let me explore why the attacks on CRT by white conservatives is ironic.

Let's start with Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose writing is at the center of one of the most dramatic consequences of anti-CRT legislation-a teacher in Tennessee being fired for teaching an essay by Coates.

Coates gained much of his fame as a contemporary writer on race while working at The Atlantic; one of his most powerful pieces examined the Donald Sterling controversy, an NBA owner who lost his ownership because of documented racist behavior. Sterling represents, according to Coates, oafish racists, individuals who express and act on explicit racism. The oafish racist, the individual racist, as Coates explains, is likely far less common in the U.S., but also far easier to identify and address.

As a CRT scholar would acknowledge, oafish racists pose no problem to scholars; however, racism and racial inequity persist in ways that cannot be linked to individual racist behavior. CRT, then, would be a useful framework for trying to explain what Coates labels as "elegant racism":

Elegant racism is invisible, supple, and enduring. It disguises itself in the national vocabulary, avoids epithets and didacticism. Grace is the singular marker of elegant racism. One should never underestimate the touch needed to, say, injure the voting rights of black people without ever saying their names. Elegant racism lives at the border of white shame. Elegant racism was the poll tax. Elegant racism is voter-ID laws.

Here are a few examples of just exactly how CRT is useful and even necessary for understanding situations exposing racial inequity.

First, consider the death of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old who was identified by a police officer as a "'Black male, maybe 20, black revolver, black handgun by him.'" Rice was shot and killed in just seconds by that officer. The shooting and killing of Rice fits into a large body of research showing that Black people are shot and killed at much higher rates than other races (for example, Black people shot 2.5 x more often than White people):
Rate of fatal police shootings in the United States from 2015 to November 2021, by ethnicity (per million of the population)
For legal scholars who have concluded that this racial rate inequity cannot be explained by simply identifying individual police officers as racists, CRT provides a process for understanding how and why the police officer shot and killed 12-year-old Rice.

Part of that explanation is systemic racism that influences everyone (regardless of their own race). For example, Black children are viewed as older than their biological ages:

The social category "children" defines a group of individuals who are perceived to be distinct, with essential characteristics including innocence and the need for protection (Haslam, Rothschild, & Ernst, 2000). The present research examined whether Black boys are given the protections of childhood equally to their peers. We tested 3 hypotheses: (a) that Black boys are seen as less "childlike" than their White peers, (b) that the characteristics associated with childhood will be applied less when thinking specifically about Black boys relative to White boys, and (c) that these trends would be exacerbated in contexts where Black males are dehumanized by associating them (implicitly) with apes (Goff, Eberhardt, Williams, & Jackson, 2008). We expected, derivative of these 3 principal hypotheses, that individuals would perceive Black boys as being more responsible for their actions and as being more appropriate targets for police violence. We find support for these hypotheses across 4 studies using laboratory, field, and translational (mixed laboratory/field) methods. We find converging evidence that Black boys are seen as older and less innocent and that they prompt a less essential conception of childhood than do their White same-age peers. Further, our findings demonstrate that the Black/ape association predicted actual racial disparities in police violence toward children. These data represent the first attitude/behavior matching of its kind in a policing context. Taken together, this research suggests that dehumanization is a uniquely dangerous intergroup attitude, that intergroup perception of children is underexplored, and that both topics should be research priorities.

The irony: While anti-CRT advocates attack CRT as a form of racism and argue CRT labels all White people as racist, CRT actually poses that the killing of Rice is not dependent on a racist police offer, but unexamined and unaddressed systemic biases against Black children. To repeat: CRT does not suggest that the individual, who in this case killed the 12-year-old Rice, is racist.

Again, ironically, training for police officers informed by CRT is the most effective mechanism for helping police officers recognize unconscious bias (viewing Black children as adults) and then change their behavior (resulting in fewer lives taken).

Finally, consider a couple more phenomena and the need for CRT as a tool to understand and address these inequities.

A report from Brookings identifies racial inequities between education and income (a racial gap identified in a large body of research):

Perry, Barr, and Romer, then, confront a problem that cannot be explained simply by the impact of individual racists on income:

Our research reveals that the median earnings for Black workers in the manufacturing industry are a staggering $25,629 less than the median for non-Black workers. This racial earnings gap is so large that it is even more pronounced than the earnings gap between workers with degrees versus without. And education does not make up for the racial income gap [emphasis added]; our analysis shows that the median Black worker with a college or trade school degree in the manufacturing industry still makes $875 less than the median white worker with no degree.

Next, consider racial inequity in terms of education, detailed in a report from The Education Trust:

Black students are more likely to attend schools that have high percentages of novice teachers in almost every state across the country. For example:

In Mississippi, about 25% of Black students attend schools with high percentages of novice teachers, compared to 7% of non-Black students.

In Maryland, nearly 40% of Black students attend schools with high percentages of novice teachers, compared to about 20% of non-Black students.

And in eight states (Arizona, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Texas), 30% or more of Black students attend schools with high percentages (greater than 20%) of novice teachers.

Not only do Black students have more novice teachers, but they also have more first-year teachers. On nationwide average, schools serving the highest percentages of Black students have 8% first-year teachers; whereas, schools serving the lowest percentages of Black students have 5% first-year teachers. In 25% of states, schools serving the greatest percentages of Black students have at least twice the percentage of first-year teachers as schools serving the fewest.

The Education Trust finds a similar disparity for Latino students.

White denial of systemic racism not only fails against evidence but also proves to be self-defeating.
Self-Defeating White Refusal
In all three phenomena above-racial inequities in police shootings, income, and access to non-novice teachers-CRT provides a tool for examining and addressing these problems that begins with the claim they are not the result from individual racism, but from systemic (and complicated) dynamics that everyone participates in unless they consciously commit to anti-racism practices.

For White people, then, CRT informed research on racial inequity that can unpack and identify the dynamics creating systemic racism can then be translated into policy and practices that eradicate those inequities-all without blaming individuals as racists.

Understanding and incorporating CRT as a tool for research and policy, then, is not a process for condemning all White people as racist. It is a pathway to racial harmony.

Being White is not a self-condemning status; however, refusing to acknowledge systemic racism and the need to find policies that create equity is a choice, one that perpetuates racism regardless of anyone's beliefs about race.

The ultimate and ugly irony is that White refusal to understand and embrace CRT is self-defeating and harmful to everyone, regardless of race.

[1] See "Claim 2" HERE.

[2] As a critical scholar who identifies with Marxist educational theory, I must emphasize that although I have completed every level of formal education through a doctorate, I have never once been assigned any CRT text or lesson. Further, my understanding and study of Marxism have primarily been on my own, beginning with Marx's non-economic writings (which I read by choice as an undergraduate after finding the book at a used book sale).
Resources from NEPC Understanding the Attacks on Critical Race Theory Critical Race Theory: What It Is. And What It Is Not. A Q&A With Adrienne Dixson NEPC Review: How to Regulate Critical Race Theory in Schools: A Primer and Model Legislation (Manhattan Institute, August 2021)
More Posts From this Author:

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Critical Race Theory: The Facts and Irony (for White People) - শুদ্ধস্বর

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As nearly daily reporting in the U.S. highlights, the manufactured anger over Critical Race Theory (CRT) continues to influence directly and indirectly both public discourse as well as teaching and learning in U.S. schools. Books are being banned, and state legislation is restricting curriculum and teaching, often in response to outcries against the non-existent influence ...

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The Limitations of Privilege Politics - JMB Consulting

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Privilege has become a commonly used tool to discuss the complex dynamics experienced by oppressed people and an attempt at acknowledging the presence of structural power. This critical review invites us to think about the limitations of using "privilege" as an analytical position and why assuming privilege in an essentialist manner can be problematic. However, we are not arguing for discarding privilege; it has some uses. Understanding when it's suitable to discuss privilege and when it may not be as suitable helps us be better anti-racist practitioners.

Introduction

Here I will attempt to clarify some of the complexities and misuses of privilege and how it can get us in somewhat of a bind. Our quest to unpack privilege will be complex and multiple. Firstly we will unpack the meaning of privilege; this will help us to understand how it has emerged and the way it is often popularly used. Following this, we will look more critically at the emergence of increased discussions focusing on privilege, specifically in the context of racial privilege - most notably the emergence of "white privilege." Then we will think through how privilege becomes essentialised to particular bodies. This simply means how we fix ideas and assumptions onto people with no chance of change or shift in their positions. Here, we will critically unpack privilege by using gender and sex as a category and explore some of its intersections with race. Developing this will be the introduction of forced disclosure, an incredibly problematic and potentially harmful action that has become the normalised part of the interactions with crude privilege politics. Finally, we will reflect on privilege and where best to use it within our anti-racist practice.

What is privilege, and how do we use it?

The history and development of the word privilege tells us that it is often used to describe the position of power that leads someone to have a better life, better outcomes, and more access to resources than others. The Oxford Dictionary definition describes privilege as a special right or advantage. This definition reveals some of how privilege can be understood, but not privilege in its totality.

What I mean here is that when we talk of white privilege or male privilege within an activist and anti-racist context, we are not saying that whiteness (or maleness) is a totalising advantage. Still, whiteness somewhat lessens the racial disadvantages experienced by racialised and minoritised groups who are not perceived as white. So when we say someone has racial privilege or privilege based on another category of oppression, we are saying that their identity or social status means they don't experience a type of marginalisation because they do not exist within a marginalised group or category .

Suppose the everyday assumption about privilege is that it means advantage, as it does in the Oxford Dictionary, then it tracks that people deemed to have privilege react negatively to it. People often go through lots of complex hardships. In fact the majority of the population experiences this hardship regardless of the social or racial category they are situated in. This complexity in how privilege is understood in the public sphere versus how it might be used in anti-racist or activitist spaces perhaps offers us one of the first instances where we see envoking privilege being viewed as antagonistic.

Whilst it is important to understand how meaning can be mobilised in different contexts, the problem with the use of privilege is more complex than a simple difference in meaning and interpretation. The differences in meaning are not so divergent or opposing that they prevent us from understanding that white privilege does not mean that white people cannot and do not experience disadvantage, but rather whiteness, to an extent, provides a cushion, or a shield, that means they seldom experience disadvantages solely because of whiteness.

So why is it that so many white people still negatively respond to the idea they don't experience hardship based on whiteness?

We need to interrogate how race comes into being and what race means within our current world to understand this, and more specifically, the construction of whiteness.

What is whiteness?

Whiteness is a complex phenomenon that has been theorised since the emergence of racial categories. In this brief section we will attempt to unpack how whiteness has become synonymous with racial privilege and racial hierarchy.

Whilst the historical construction of whiteness as superior is easily evidenced, it is crucial that we understand that whiteness does not always mean white skin or those who may in their bodily presentation look like what we would deem white people to look like. While there have been many historical attempts to understand whiteness, its meaning has shifted, and its fixtures on bodies, and presentation, have also shifted in various ways.

To understand whiteness, we must locate it in a particular geography and history - whiteness didn't just come out of nowhere. Historical analysis of whiteness tells us that as a category, whiteness was primarily located within the geographies of Europe. However, this initial project of whiteness expanded through colonial rule and saw whiteness extend beyond Europe to include settler colonies such as the Americas and Australias. Whiteness in Europe did not happen by accident. It wasn't simply a consequence of looking at the distinct pigmentocratic presentations of skin tone across the globe. The organisation of skin colour under a pigmentocracy explains how we come to see skin colour and be organised within a hierarchical system that positions whiteness as the superior skin allocation. As historians of Europe have explained, people with different skin colours had been interacting for centuries before racial categories began to shape hierarchies of power.

The scholar Cedric Robinson invited us to understand that even before racial difference became fixed based on skin tone - how we understand race today - Europeans had been engaging in forms of racialised hierarchies.

We can see this through the various wars of domination that saw European ethnic groups from the Anglo-Saxons to the Norse, the Norman, the Celts, the Picts and many other formations groups organised around loose racial and familial ties. Within these pre-existing racial groups was the constant strife for dominance that saw the interaction and the creation of new racial categories. However, most notably was the ability to conquer ethnic groups and establish a form of social order by legitimising their conquests through systems of monarchy. The creation of a monarchy and the idea that a lineage of people by virtue of their birthright legitimises their rightful dominance is the birthplace of the emergence of the domination exported across the globe through colonial rule.

Nevertheless, it was a secondary and just as significant a project that enshrined these racial dominance notions - nationalism. The project of nationalism, certified through monarchy, was a system that sought to merge these ethnic differences into a singular identity category. It is essential also to recognise that there were groups, because of their class or their existence within a subordinate ethnic group, that were bound to a life of servitude and oppression throughout this history. The growing populations of exploited groups under these various contexts began to cause problems for the ruling groups through peasant rebellions and revolts. There was a need to squash this discontent and for monarchies to consolidate power.

The creation of the nation as a project was ingenious; it solved the problems of identity, class and ethnic-based differences by offering these various communities a sacred promise. This promise of a unified category gave dispossessed people in Europe the ability to buy into their nation, fight for their empire and monarchs and view themselves as in tune with their rulers on the premises of Englishness, Frenchness, Germanness and the like. This promise was further legitimised by creating institutions of education, citizenship and judicial rule that legislated this promise with a formal guarantee.

This project also created a necessary 'other.' In the first instance this was the other nation of which the empires sought to conquer; the wars between European nations give us evidence of this strife. Under the nation, there was unity, coalition, and similarity that meant something to the masses of people - although these were primarily symbolic. For much of European history, this idea of nationhood was the grounds on which wars were fought. However, in the growth of the population, the transformation to different social orders and most notably in the emergence of capitalism meant that this system became unsustainable. Europe as a continent had little resources and "wins" from conflict within the continent, and as such, these nations set their sites on what is now referred to as the global south.

Within these conquests by European nations on lands outside of theirs was still the presence of intracontinental strife. The solution to this conflict was to build a coalition to strengthen European conquest. Here we see how racial politics was brought together to unify Europe under the category of whiteness. However, simply organising around whiteness was not enough to uphold European whiteness; racial categories outside of this identity needed to be created - the 'necessary other.'

Whilst many see the creation of species based difference across racial lines as simply a process of categorisation or social construction, they do little to explain how whiteness became the agreed superior. To justify the tools of genocide, slavery and eradication of racial groups, whiteness had to mean something different. It had to mean dominance, superiority. Here we see how then whiteness is rendered to mean and justify racial subjugation. Here, we see how whiteness becomes synonymous with power, which in the current moment, becomes read as a privilege.

Whilst this historical account is necessary to understand how "white supremacy" becomes a contractual agreement between European nations, it is vital to recognise the category of whiteness has never meant simply white skin. In creating this coalition project of whiteness, skin colour or even presentation as white has never been enough. In the initial project of whiteness, buying into racial superiority meant buying into a capitalist social order. It meant alignment with the geopolitical projects of colonial domination and plunder.

This project excluded those who did not have the means or interest in engaging in whiteness. We see throughout history how whiteness comes with conditions, which means it can be awarded and stripped away at any given moment. We see also how, through this false promise of whiteness, those deemed white have still not benefited in the same way their ruling class has. Whiteness then becomes a mythical entity that promises everything yet seldom actualises this promise, unless one is willing to forego the humanity of others and engage in capitalist exploitation. This is in fact the reality of whiteness that scholar Alana Lentin has articulated is part of the wider technologies (and by technology we mean a tool of power) of racial capitalism which functions by organising the world and producing racism.

White Privilege and its Emergence

The history of how whiteness emerges as a geopolitical technology enacted through imperial domination shows us the significance of how whiteness can be understood as constructing a particular meaning. Here it becomes clear the creation of whiteness was to deem it and those conscripted under it to a position of dominance above other racial groups. Whilst this history opens to us how perhaps whiteness can be understood as a privilege, it is essential to recognise that this wasn't how whiteness as a system of domination became tied to privilege. To understand how white privilege becomes mobilised, we need to understand where this idea of privilege came from.

Peggy Mckintosh initially coined the term white privilege in an essay she penned in 1989 entitled Unpacking The Invisible Knapsack . Here McIntosh reflects on her positionality as a white woman in the context of American racial society. Whilst McIntosh alludes to some of the history that created the racial dominance of white people in American society, her analysis lacks the depth of precision that even this brief article has attempted. Most notable about McIntosh analysis is introspection and self-reflection on her own experiences. McIntosh lists 26 instances where she experiences what she identifies as white privilege. In this, there is the assumption that it is mostly her whiteness at play and not, in fact, her class privilege that materially locates her as a beneficiary of privilege beyond even some of her white counterparts.

McIntosh somewhat attempts to account for her gender. Still, there is little that unpacks how her white privilege is also a specifically gendered phenomenon that can, in many instances, permit white womanhood virtues that other women are excluded from.

In McIntosh's reflective essay on white privilege, what becomes clear to us is that privilege perhaps serves a specific function. This function is primarily a tool through which white people may, through individual reflection, understand how they benefit from specific societal protocols. Most notably then, privilege is not an all-encompassing analytical method not is it necessarily a viable tool for anti-racist practice in action beyond our individual ability to hold ourselves accountable.

Privilege and essentialism

As the previous section makes apparent privilege as the method has a purpose, which is one of self-reflection. However, somehow this tool of self-reflection has morphed into something quite contentious. Here what we see mobilised is the conflation of the historical meaning of whiteness due to the dominance of white supremacy with a social understanding of whiteness as synonymous with privilege in a way that makes white privilege a fixture that can never be removed, negotiated or changed. This process is what I'm calling the creation of "privilege as essentialism".

Essentialism as is being used here refers to the process through which meaning, ideas, stereotypes and assumptions become fixed on a group of people based on physical assumptions about what their bodies, genders, skin colours and cultures mean and represent. This rids us of our ability to have and understand individual agency and also conscripts groups of people to one fixed means of understanding their identity. When wielded through a lens of essentialism privilege assumes irredeemability and requires constant apology for existing.

We often see privilege as essentialism mobilised because of white supremacy, the political doctrine that orientates much of the global social order; whiteness then is cast as irredeemable. Due to a lack of historical analysis that informs our understanding of race and whiteness, when we talk about white privilege, we are not talking about the clear political structure of whiteness (as we should be) but rather whiteness as sin colour.

Because of the dominance and violence of white supremacy, it is hard to critically view privilege as essentialism as problematic, but it is damaging. One of the facts about race is that its meanings change, and as such, whiteness and its definition are susceptible to such changes. More so, a historical analysis of race tells us that white skin, or perhaps a person who may appear as white, may not necessarily be white or treated with the same status as has been traditionally associated with European whiteness (such as Jewish people and Sinti, Roma, Traveller communities etc).

Assuming white skin creates an essentialist power that is irredeemably oppressive blocks our ability to understand the complexity of experience many may have. Additionally, this essentialism affects people of colour more significantly; if we imprint race in a manner that is inexorably tied to the meaning associated with a particular race, we repeat racist myths, stereotypes and ideas.

To understand our critique of privilege as essentialism further, we can look at the case of sex essentialism reduced to biology. Often used as an argument that seeks to protect women from the harms of men, we see time and time again how 'maleness' becomes essentially tied to 'manhood.' Still, more than that, the ills of manhood become deemed something biological (rather than social) that is not changeable. By conflating maleness with manhood, people who present as male but maybe non-binary are tarred with a brush that assumes that due to their physical presence or presumptions of their biological sex, they are capable of harm and need to be excluded from spaces. Similar arguments are used against trans women who are denied access to spaces for women due to the essentialist notion that because they are assigned male at birth, they are irredeemably, and unchangeably part of the category of manhood, which is viewed as a potential threat to cis womanhood.

Essentialism in our everyday lives is an incredibly troubling prospect. When it comes to how we use privilege, we have to be wary of recreating these essentialist points that fix a particular characteristic (often a negative one to any group), or assume how they initially may present to us either through their race or their gender means that they must and always benefit or have privilege. We must remain critical and unassuming in how we engage in our day to day lives.

Assumptions and Forced Disclosure

Whilst essentialism is a phenomenon that we should be concerned with as it can be mobilised in a way that fixes our identities, it also leads to rather devastating actions. Specifically, forced disclosure and the normalisation of trauma disclosures as a way to absolve ourselves of the charges of privilege leveraged against us. Activist and scholar Yasmin Nair has long reviewed this procedure, which can cause forms of trauma and isolation. The problem with privilege as essentialism politics and the use of privilege as an accusation rather than tool for reflection is that it leads people to respond to the charge by declaring and disclosing the reality of their lives and their traumas.

In the case of people who do have structural benefits, disclosures of their troubles lead us to little resolution or concern. It often shifts the ability to grapple with the realities of structural oppression. We must ask ourselves, what were we expecting? When one deems a white person privileged, what does that do to change the structural power offered by whiteness? It does little to nothing but instead provokes antagonism and creates an unnecessary distraction from the very issues we seek to dismantle. Such uses of privilege should be evidenced as having little utility in our practice of anti-oppression.

Furthermore, the problem of using privilege in this manner is how it can often affect people of colour and other marginalised folk. Let's return to the example of non-binary or white-passing groups. In the case of non-binary people, this essentialism forces us to reduce their identities to how they may physically present - often if they present in a masculine manner - which requires them to disclose their identity in a space that may not be safe or nurturing, otherwise known as people "outing themselves". As we know, coming out is a very personal decision and one that often thrusts people into harm's way. If we assume a masculine person has privilege, and they attempt to correct us, they may disclose their identity in a manner they wished not to. It takes away their agency and privacy and forces them to offer us their experience as a defence against our accusation.

This should deeply trouble us; in a similar instance, whiteness as a structure does not always make itself easily recognisable, yet we often think of whiteness not as history, not as structural, but rather as somatic, meaning worn on the skin/body. Yet the more we come to know about whiteness as a body politic, as essentialism, it is clear that it does not always make sense. There is a variety of skin, features, and physical appearance in many racial categories and groups. Whilst whiteness may sometimes lead us to assume a form of privilege or at the very least some form of benefit of the association. How do we see a Syrian refugee - who may have features that look like what we deem white through the dominant narratives of European whiteness (which are rooted in harmful race science) - and assume that their white skin and features mean they have some privilege? In this instance, what we are doing in the first instance is repeating racist myths of featurism and dismissing the validity of experiences of hardship.

Beyond the way privilege accusations distract from our ability to understand whiteness and tackle structures of white supremacy, they also individualise the complexity of these structures that govern our day to day interactions and locate them in the interpersonal. We are all exhausted in the ways we are forced to manage the nonsense of interpersonal disagreements where our anti-racist actions are ignored to manage feelings. So perhaps we need a new way of tackling things, and maybe we need to shift away from a perspective that promotes these types of engagements.

Beyond Privilege

So with all the challenges and critiques posed by this essay, what should we do with "privilege"? Its popularity is perhaps due to its accessibility and the ease with which it can be used to point out a different power dynamic. However, in its simplicity, we lose the complexities of structural oppression and the nuances of political and social interactions. If we return to McIntosh's use of privilege, perhaps then we can see its usefulness. Here then, privilege should be used in a similar manner she does. We could all benefit from reflexivity.

Reflexivity is a practice of self-reflection and self-accountability for how we interact with the world. Whilst the macro structures of racism, sexism, ableism and other vectors of marginality can feel so large and at times impossible, reflecting on our contributions to such a system may be beneficial for tackling how we may dismantle it. Here, it is up to us to identify instances where we have power and make a pledge to use that power to alleviate oppressive systems.

However, whilst reflection is helpful, it cannot and should not be the totality of our actions. Alongside this process of self-reflection and self-accountability needs to be tangible action. We must ensure we dedicate ourselves to building coalitions that recognise differences yet organise around a goal of dismantling systems that normalise forms of oppression. Asking people to check their privilege should be an act of care, where we all acknowledge systems that benefit us and commit to ensuring we use our power to chip away at the machine of oppression.

References

1. Ahmed, S., 2007. A phenomenology of whiteness. Feminist theory, 8(2), pp.149-168.

2. Dabiri, E., 2021. What white people can do next: from allyship to coalition. Penguin UK.

3. Harris, C.I., 1993. Whiteness as property. Harvard law review, pp.1707-1791.

4. Kivel, P., 2017. Uprooting racism-: How white people can work for racial justice. New Society Publishers.

5. Leonardo, Z., 2004. The color of supremacy: Beyond the discourse of 'white privilege. Educational philosophy and theory, 36(2), pp.137-152.

6. McIntosh, P., 2018. White privilege and male privilege. In privilege (pp. 28-40). Routledge.

7. Meyerson, G., 2000. Rethinking black marxism: Reflections on Cedric Robinson and others. Cultural Logic: A Journal of Marxist Theory & Practice,

8. Mills, C.W., 2014. The racial contract. Cornell University Press.

Privilege has become a commonly used tool to discuss the complex dynamics experienced by oppressed people and an attempt at acknowledging the presence of structural power. This critical review invites us to think about the limitations of using "privilege" as an analytical position and why assuming privilege in an essentialist manner can be problematic. However, we are not arguing for discarding privilege; it has some uses. Understanding when it's suitable to discuss privilege and when it may not be as suitable helps us be better anti-racist practitioners.

Introduction

Here I will attempt to clarify some of the complexities and misuses of privilege and how it can get us in somewhat of a bind. Our quest to unpack privilege will be complex and multiple. Firstly we will unpack the meaning of privilege; this will help us to understand how it has emerged and the way it is often popularly used. Following this, we will look more critically at the emergence of increased discussions focusing on privilege, specifically in the context of racial privilege - most notably the emergence of "white privilege." Then we will think through how privilege becomes essentialised to particular bodies. This simply means how we fix ideas and assumptions onto people with no chance of change or shift in their positions. Here, we will critically unpack privilege by using gender and sex as a category and explore some of its intersections with race. Developing this will be the introduction of forced disclosure, an incredibly problematic and potentially harmful action that has become the normalised part of the interactions with crude privilege politics. Finally, we will reflect on privilege and where best to use it within our anti-racist practice.

What is privilege, and how do we use it?

The history and development of the word privilege tells us that it is often used to describe the position of power that leads someone to have a better life, better outcomes, and more access to resources than others. The Oxford Dictionary definition describes privilege as a special right or advantage. This definition reveals some of how privilege can be understood, but not privilege in its totality.

What I mean here is that when we talk of white privilege or male privilege within an activist and anti-racist context, we are not saying that whiteness (or maleness) is a totalising advantage. Still, whiteness somewhat lessens the racial disadvantages experienced by racialised and minoritised groups who are not perceived as white. So when we say someone has racial privilege or privilege based on another category of oppression, we are saying that their identity or social status means they don't experience a type of marginalisation because they do not exist within a marginalised group or category .

Suppose the everyday assumption about privilege is that it means advantage, as it does in the Oxford Dictionary, then it tracks that people deemed to have privilege react negatively to it. People often go through lots of complex hardships. In fact the majority of the population experiences this hardship regardless of the social or racial category they are situated in. This complexity in how privilege is understood in the public sphere versus how it might be used in anti-racist or activitist spaces perhaps offers us one of the first instances where we see envoking privilege being viewed as antagonistic.

Whilst it is important to understand how meaning can be mobilised in different contexts, the problem with the use of privilege is more complex than a simple difference in meaning and interpretation. The differences in meaning are not so divergent or opposing that they prevent us from understanding that white privilege does not mean that white people cannot and do not experience disadvantage, but rather whiteness, to an extent, provides a cushion, or a shield, that means they seldom experience disadvantages solely because of whiteness.

So why is it that so many white people still negatively respond to the idea they don't experience hardship based on whiteness?

We need to interrogate how race comes into being and what race means within our current world to understand this, and more specifically, the construction of whiteness.

What is whiteness?

Whiteness is a complex phenomenon that has been theorised since the emergence of racial categories. In this brief section we will attempt to unpack how whiteness has become synonymous with racial privilege and racial hierarchy.

Whilst the historical construction of whiteness as superior is easily evidenced, it is crucial that we understand that whiteness does not always mean white skin or those who may in their bodily presentation look like what we would deem white people to look like. While there have been many historical attempts to understand whiteness, its meaning has shifted, and its fixtures on bodies, and presentation, have also shifted in various ways.

To understand whiteness, we must locate it in a particular geography and history - whiteness didn't just come out of nowhere. Historical analysis of whiteness tells us that as a category, whiteness was primarily located within the geographies of Europe. However, this initial project of whiteness expanded through colonial rule and saw whiteness extend beyond Europe to include settler colonies such as the Americas and Australias. Whiteness in Europe did not happen by accident. It wasn't simply a consequence of looking at the distinct pigmentocratic presentations of skin tone across the globe. The organisation of skin colour under a pigmentocracy explains how we come to see skin colour and be organised within a hierarchical system that positions whiteness as the superior skin allocation. As historians of Europe have explained, people with different skin colours had been interacting for centuries before racial categories began to shape hierarchies of power.

The scholar Cedric Robinson invited us to understand that even before racial difference became fixed based on skin tone - how we understand race today - Europeans had been engaging in forms of racialised hierarchies.

We can see this through the various wars of domination that saw European ethnic groups from the Anglo-Saxons to the Norse, the Norman, the Celts, the Picts and many other formations groups organised around loose racial and familial ties. Within these pre-existing racial groups was the constant strife for dominance that saw the interaction and the creation of new racial categories. However, most notably was the ability to conquer ethnic groups and establish a form of social order by legitimising their conquests through systems of monarchy. The creation of a monarchy and the idea that a lineage of people by virtue of their birthright legitimises their rightful dominance is the birthplace of the emergence of the domination exported across the globe through colonial rule.

Nevertheless, it was a secondary and just as significant a project that enshrined these racial dominance notions - nationalism. The project of nationalism, certified through monarchy, was a system that sought to merge these ethnic differences into a singular identity category. It is essential also to recognise that there were groups, because of their class or their existence within a subordinate ethnic group, that were bound to a life of servitude and oppression throughout this history. The growing populations of exploited groups under these various contexts began to cause problems for the ruling groups through peasant rebellions and revolts. There was a need to squash this discontent and for monarchies to consolidate power.

The creation of the nation as a project was ingenious; it solved the problems of identity, class and ethnic-based differences by offering these various communities a sacred promise. This promise of a unified category gave dispossessed people in Europe the ability to buy into their nation, fight for their empire and monarchs and view themselves as in tune with their rulers on the premises of Englishness, Frenchness, Germanness and the like. This promise was further legitimised by creating institutions of education, citizenship and judicial rule that legislated this promise with a formal guarantee.

This project also created a necessary 'other.' In the first instance this was the other nation of which the empires sought to conquer; the wars between European nations give us evidence of this strife. Under the nation, there was unity, coalition, and similarity that meant something to the masses of people - although these were primarily symbolic. For much of European history, this idea of nationhood was the grounds on which wars were fought. However, in the growth of the population, the transformation to different social orders and most notably in the emergence of capitalism meant that this system became unsustainable. Europe as a continent had little resources and "wins" from conflict within the continent, and as such, these nations set their sites on what is now referred to as the global south.

Within these conquests by European nations on lands outside of theirs was still the presence of intracontinental strife. The solution to this conflict was to build a coalition to strengthen European conquest. Here we see how racial politics was brought together to unify Europe under the category of whiteness. However, simply organising around whiteness was not enough to uphold European whiteness; racial categories outside of this identity needed to be created - the 'necessary other.'

Whilst many see the creation of species based difference across racial lines as simply a process of categorisation or social construction, they do little to explain how whiteness became the agreed superior. To justify the tools of genocide, slavery and eradication of racial groups, whiteness had to mean something different. It had to mean dominance, superiority. Here we see how then whiteness is rendered to mean and justify racial subjugation. Here, we see how whiteness becomes synonymous with power, which in the current moment, becomes read as a privilege.

Whilst this historical account is necessary to understand how "white supremacy" becomes a contractual agreement between European nations, it is vital to recognise the category of whiteness has never meant simply white skin. In creating this coalition project of whiteness, skin colour or even presentation as white has never been enough. In the initial project of whiteness, buying into racial superiority meant buying into a capitalist social order. It meant alignment with the geopolitical projects of colonial domination and plunder.

This project excluded those who did not have the means or interest in engaging in whiteness. We see throughout history how whiteness comes with conditions, which means it can be awarded and stripped away at any given moment. We see also how, through this false promise of whiteness, those deemed white have still not benefited in the same way their ruling class has. Whiteness then becomes a mythical entity that promises everything yet seldom actualises this promise, unless one is willing to forego the humanity of others and engage in capitalist exploitation. This is in fact the reality of whiteness that scholar Alana Lentin has articulated is part of the wider technologies (and by technology we mean a tool of power) of racial capitalism which functions by organising the world and producing racism.

White Privilege and its Emergence

The history of how whiteness emerges as a geopolitical technology enacted through imperial domination shows us the significance of how whiteness can be understood as constructing a particular meaning. Here it becomes clear the creation of whiteness was to deem it and those conscripted under it to a position of dominance above other racial groups. Whilst this history opens to us how perhaps whiteness can be understood as a privilege, it is essential to recognise that this wasn't how whiteness as a system of domination became tied to privilege. To understand how white privilege becomes mobilised, we need to understand where this idea of privilege came from.

Peggy Mckintosh initially coined the term white privilege in an essay she penned in 1989 entitled Unpacking The Invisible Knapsack . Here McIntosh reflects on her positionality as a white woman in the context of American racial society. Whilst McIntosh alludes to some of the history that created the racial dominance of white people in American society, her analysis lacks the depth of precision that even this brief article has attempted. Most notable about McIntosh analysis is introspection and self-reflection on her own experiences. McIntosh lists 26 instances where she experiences what she identifies as white privilege. In this, there is the assumption that it is mostly her whiteness at play and not, in fact, her class privilege that materially locates her as a beneficiary of privilege beyond even some of her white counterparts.

McIntosh somewhat attempts to account for her gender. Still, there is little that unpacks how her white privilege is also a specifically gendered phenomenon that can, in many instances, permit white womanhood virtues that other women are excluded from.

In McIntosh's reflective essay on white privilege, what becomes clear to us is that privilege perhaps serves a specific function. This function is primarily a tool through which white people may, through individual reflection, understand how they benefit from specific societal protocols. Most notably then, privilege is not an all-encompassing analytical method not is it necessarily a viable tool for anti-racist practice in action beyond our individual ability to hold ourselves accountable.

Privilege and essentialism

As the previous section makes apparent privilege as the method has a purpose, which is one of self-reflection. However, somehow this tool of self-reflection has morphed into something quite contentious. Here what we see mobilised is the conflation of the historical meaning of whiteness due to the dominance of white supremacy with a social understanding of whiteness as synonymous with privilege in a way that makes white privilege a fixture that can never be removed, negotiated or changed. This process is what I'm calling the creation of "privilege as essentialism".

Essentialism as is being used here refers to the process through which meaning, ideas, stereotypes and assumptions become fixed on a group of people based on physical assumptions about what their bodies, genders, skin colours and cultures mean and represent. This rids us of our ability to have and understand individual agency and also conscripts groups of people to one fixed means of understanding their identity. When wielded through a lens of essentialism privilege assumes irredeemability and requires constant apology for existing.

We often see privilege as essentialism mobilised because of white supremacy, the political doctrine that orientates much of the global social order; whiteness then is cast as irredeemable. Due to a lack of historical analysis that informs our understanding of race and whiteness, when we talk about white privilege, we are not talking about the clear political structure of whiteness (as we should be) but rather whiteness as sin colour.

Because of the dominance and violence of white supremacy, it is hard to critically view privilege as essentialism as problematic, but it is damaging. One of the facts about race is that its meanings change, and as such, whiteness and its definition are susceptible to such changes. More so, a historical analysis of race tells us that white skin, or perhaps a person who may appear as white, may not necessarily be white or treated with the same status as has been traditionally associated with European whiteness (such as Jewish people and Sinti, Roma, Traveller communities etc).

Assuming white skin creates an essentialist power that is irredeemably oppressive blocks our ability to understand the complexity of experience many may have. Additionally, this essentialism affects people of colour more significantly; if we imprint race in a manner that is inexorably tied to the meaning associated with a particular race, we repeat racist myths, stereotypes and ideas.

To understand our critique of privilege as essentialism further, we can look at the case of sex essentialism reduced to biology. Often used as an argument that seeks to protect women from the harms of men, we see time and time again how 'maleness' becomes essentially tied to 'manhood.' Still, more than that, the ills of manhood become deemed something biological (rather than social) that is not changeable. By conflating maleness with manhood, people who present as male but maybe non-binary are tarred with a brush that assumes that due to their physical presence or presumptions of their biological sex, they are capable of harm and need to be excluded from spaces. Similar arguments are used against trans women who are denied access to spaces for women due to the essentialist notion that because they are assigned male at birth, they are irredeemably, and unchangeably part of the category of manhood, which is viewed as a potential threat to cis womanhood.

Essentialism in our everyday lives is an incredibly troubling prospect. When it comes to how we use privilege, we have to be wary of recreating these essentialist points that fix a particular characteristic (often a negative one to any group), or assume how they initially may present to us either through their race or their gender means that they must and always benefit or have privilege. We must remain critical and unassuming in how we engage in our day to day lives.

Assumptions and Forced Disclosure

Whilst essentialism is a phenomenon that we should be concerned with as it can be mobilised in a way that fixes our identities, it also leads to rather devastating actions. Specifically, forced disclosure and the normalisation of trauma disclosures as a way to absolve ourselves of the charges of privilege leveraged against us. Activist and scholar Yasmin Nair has long reviewed this procedure, which can cause forms of trauma and isolation. The problem with privilege as essentialism politics and the use of privilege as an accusation rather than tool for reflection is that it leads people to respond to the charge by declaring and disclosing the reality of their lives and their traumas.

In the case of people who do have structural benefits, disclosures of their troubles lead us to little resolution or concern. It often shifts the ability to grapple with the realities of structural oppression. We must ask ourselves, what were we expecting? When one deems a white person privileged, what does that do to change the structural power offered by whiteness? It does little to nothing but instead provokes antagonism and creates an unnecessary distraction from the very issues we seek to dismantle. Such uses of privilege should be evidenced as having little utility in our practice of anti-oppression.

Furthermore, the problem of using privilege in this manner is how it can often affect people of colour and other marginalised folk. Let's return to the example of non-binary or white-passing groups. In the case of non-binary people, this essentialism forces us to reduce their identities to how they may physically present - often if they present in a masculine manner - which requires them to disclose their identity in a space that may not be safe or nurturing, otherwise known as people "outing themselves". As we know, coming out is a very personal decision and one that often thrusts people into harm's way. If we assume a masculine person has privilege, and they attempt to correct us, they may disclose their identity in a manner they wished not to. It takes away their agency and privacy and forces them to offer us their experience as a defence against our accusation.

This should deeply trouble us; in a similar instance, whiteness as a structure does not always make itself easily recognisable, yet we often think of whiteness not as history, not as structural, but rather as somatic, meaning worn on the skin/body. Yet the more we come to know about whiteness as a body politic, as essentialism, it is clear that it does not always make sense. There is a variety of skin, features, and physical appearance in many racial categories and groups. Whilst whiteness may sometimes lead us to assume a form of privilege or at the very least some form of benefit of the association. How do we see a Syrian refugee - who may have features that look like what we deem white through the dominant narratives of European whiteness (which are rooted in harmful race science) - and assume that their white skin and features mean they have some privilege? In this instance, what we are doing in the first instance is repeating racist myths of featurism and dismissing the validity of experiences of hardship.

Beyond the way privilege accusations distract from our ability to understand whiteness and tackle structures of white supremacy, they also individualise the complexity of these structures that govern our day to day interactions and locate them in the interpersonal. We are all exhausted in the ways we are forced to manage the nonsense of interpersonal disagreements where our anti-racist actions are ignored to manage feelings. So perhaps we need a new way of tackling things, and maybe we need to shift away from a perspective that promotes these types of engagements.

Beyond Privilege

So with all the challenges and critiques posed by this essay, what should we do with "privilege"? Its popularity is perhaps due to its accessibility and the ease with which it can be used to point out a different power dynamic. However, in its simplicity, we lose the complexities of structural oppression and the nuances of political and social interactions. If we return to McIntosh's use of privilege, perhaps then we can see its usefulness. Here then, privilege should be used in a similar manner she does. We could all benefit from reflexivity.

Reflexivity is a practice of self-reflection and self-accountability for how we interact with the world. Whilst the macro structures of racism, sexism, ableism and other vectors of marginality can feel so large and at times impossible, reflecting on our contributions to such a system may be beneficial for tackling how we may dismantle it. Here, it is up to us to identify instances where we have power and make a pledge to use that power to alleviate oppressive systems.

However, whilst reflection is helpful, it cannot and should not be the totality of our actions. Alongside this process of self-reflection and self-accountability needs to be tangible action. We must ensure we dedicate ourselves to building coalitions that recognise differences yet organise around a goal of dismantling systems that normalise forms of oppression. Asking people to check their privilege should be an act of care, where we all acknowledge systems that benefit us and commit to ensuring we use our power to chip away at the machine of oppression.

References

1. Ahmed, S., 2007. A phenomenology of whiteness. Feminist theory, 8(2), pp.149-168.

2. Dabiri, E., 2021. What white people can do next: from allyship to coalition. Penguin UK.

3. Harris, C.I., 1993. Whiteness as property. Harvard law review, pp.1707-1791.

4. Kivel, P., 2017. Uprooting racism-: How white people can work for racial justice. New Society Publishers.

5. Leonardo, Z., 2004. The color of supremacy: Beyond the discourse of 'white privilege. Educational philosophy and theory, 36(2), pp.137-152.

6. McIntosh, P., 2018. White privilege and male privilege. In privilege (pp. 28-40). Routledge.

7. Meyerson, G., 2000. Rethinking black marxism: Reflections on Cedric Robinson and others. Cultural Logic: A Journal of Marxist Theory & Practice,

8. Mills, C.W., 2014. The racial contract. Cornell University Press.

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The Limitations of Privilege Politics - JMB Consulting

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Privilege has become a commonly used tool to discuss the complex dynamics experienced by oppressed people and an attempt at acknowledging the presence of structural power. This critical review invites us to think about the limitations of using "privilege" as an analytical position and why

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Pariss Athena | Founder of Black Tech Pipeline

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It's not white fragility, it's white violence

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It's not white fragility, it's white violence

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Pariss Athena | Founder of Black Tech Pipeline

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Pariss Athena | Founder of Black Tech Pipeline

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Pariss Athena | Founder of Black Tech Pipeline

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TALK 👏🏾THAT👏🏾 SHIT👏🏾 pic.twitter.com/cgYfFSRVHp
— Pariss Athena | Founder of Black Tech Pipeline (@ParissAthena) March 20, 2022

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Pariss Athena | Founder of Black Tech Pipeline

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Pariss Athena | Founder of Black Tech Pipeline

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This opportunity came and went but the systemic racial disparities remained. With the help of the late Laurent Berlant, we can see why this expectation of progress ultimately rests in "optimism's double bind", where "an image of a better good life available" creates an impasse that does not easily allow us to "detach from what is already not working".

For example, the striking thing about the MacPherson Report's assessment is that it had been offered long before. The Scarman Report, which investigated the causes of the 1981 Brixton riots, concluded: "the evidence which I have received, the effect of which I have outlined ... leaves no doubt in my mind that racial disadvantage is a fact of current British life ... Urgent action is needed." Lord Scarman was reticent to name institutional racism, and yet he could not deny that "racialism and discrimination against black people - often hidden, sometimes unconscious - remain a major source of social tension and conflict".

More recently, the Windrush Lessons Learned Review, conducted by Wendy Williams, emphasised the role of "institutional ignorance and thoughtlessness" in the scandal, which she concluded "are consistent with some elements of the definition of institutional racism".

What Berlant helps us to see is that while shocking racial injustice may appear traumatic when accounted for at one moment in time, as a society we have learned to live with a systemic crisis - or, as Berlant puts it, "crisis ordinariness". In this telling, extraordinary events such as the Windrush scandal or the impact of the COVID-19 crisis turn out to be "an amplification of something in the works".

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In the fight for racial justice, optimism is not enough

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This opportunity came and went but the systemic racial disparities remained. With the help of the late Laurent Berlant, we can see why this expectation of progress ultimately rests in "optimism's double bind", where "an image of a better good life available" creates an impasse that does not easily allow us to "detach from what is already not working".

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Opinion | We Need a New Language for Talking About Race

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We need a new language for talking about race

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We need a new language for talking about race

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Credit... Illustration by Billie Carter-Rankin

Henry Louis Gates Jr. and

Dr. Gates is a professor at Harvard University. Dr. Curran is a professor at Wesleyan University. They edited the forthcoming book "Who's Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter From the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race."

The other day, while teaching a lecture class, one of us mentioned in passing that the average African American, according to a 2014 paper, is about 24 percent European and less than 1 percent Native American. A student responded that these percentages were impossible to measure, since "race is a social construction."

Given our country's history of scientific racism - and all of the horrible crimes and abuses that African Americans have been subjected to in the name of science - the fact that race is a social invention and not a biological reality cannot be repeated too much. However, while race is socially constructed, genetic mutations - biological records of ancestry - are not, and the distinction is a crucial one.

To be fair, we really can't blame this student for being confused. To varying degrees, we have all inherited a muddled understanding of race, ancestry and phenotype from the Enlightenment, an era when European savants freed themselves from biblical explanations of the species and claimed the right to tell all of humankind - particularly Africans and people of African descent - who we supposedly are. But if we don't disentangle these concepts, we may miss the great promise of using genetics to push back against a very long and sad history of the misuse of science for pernicious purposes.

To understand that history, it is helpful to look back at the origins of racial "science" in Europe. One of the key moments in the evolution of modern concepts of race occurred in France in 1741, when the members of Bordeaux's Royal Academy of Sciences held a continentwide essay contest on the "cause" of dark skin and textured hair among African populations. Why, they asked, were Black people Black?

While various explanations of Black skin had been circulating since antiquity, the 1741 contest was almost certainly the first time that a scientific institution had taken up the question, extending an invitation to Europe's best thinkers to invent origin stories about a so-called subspecies of humans based on their appearance.

The resulting essays - which came from as far as Holland, Sweden and Ireland - offer a unique window into 18th-century understandings of race. Participants wrote that blackness came from the vapors that emanated from the skin or from darkened sperm, that the power of a pregnant mother's imagination had imprinted the color on her child, that the stifling heat and humidity of the tropics stained the skin and clouded the humors. Others hinted at the mutation of an original prototype race into humankind's many varieties - somewhat closer to what we believe today. The most influential entry was submitted by a surgeon who, while living in the New World, had dissected the bodies of enslaved Africans. This doctor - the only contestant who ultimately published his essay - inspired a number of other anatomists to hunt for specific (and of course bogus) physiological structures in African bodies.

In a way, this contest signaled a new era of "scientific racism." In the decades that followed, naturalists increasingly subdivided the human species into several so-called races by things like skin color, hair texture, skull shape and, most perniciously, according to supposedly transcendent essences. As Immanuel Kant put it in 1764, the fact that a man "was very black from head to foot," was "clear proof that what he said was stupid." See a Black face, see stupidity, and from this vicious cycle, there was no escape. This is how race ultimately came to function: as a way to divide us. And it has done so with remarkable success - and often brutal results - for hundreds of years.

Fast-forward to our era, when new advancements in technology are once again changing the way we think about human origins. With the recent rise in availability of tools for individual genetic analysis, tens of millions of people have eagerly had their DNA tested - hoping, among other things, to find out where their ancestors hail from.

Commercial DNA tests vary widely, and some trace DNA to more than 2,000 regions worldwide. These companies use autosomal (referring to the chromosomes in our genomes that are not our sex chromosomes) analysis to measure shared mutations - known as single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs - that we have inherited from our ancestors, helping to reveal where they were living over the past few hundred years.

The specificity with which this new technology is able to determine individual origins is staggering. For example, one of us, Henry Louis Gates Jr., knows, purely through his DNA, that he is descended from an Irish American man who fathered his great-great-grandmother's oldest son, because Gates's y-DNA signature is one that he shares with a ton of men in Ireland. CeCe Moore, a well-known genetic genealogist, has identified that forebear's name and biographical details, long a mystery in the Gates family, by analyzing the family trees of all of the people with whom Dr. Gates shares DNA in publicly available databases. On his mother's line, he is descended from a white woman, most likely from England, who had a child with a man of sub-Saharan African descent at some point during the time of slavery, though their identities have been lost.

It would be an understatement to say that he was astonished to learn that his recent ancestral mutations trace back equally to sub-Saharan Africa and to Europe. As a friend of his joked: Who could have guessed that a Black scholar who has spent so much of his professional life searching for his long-veiled African ancestry would finally find it - only to discover that he's half a white man. That friend's joke allowed him to make a point: There is no category for white in genetic analysis; half of his ancestry traces back to regions in Europe. We should never forget that whiteness, like Blackness, is just another social fiction.

There can be fewer more dramatic demonstrations that race is a social construction than his own DNA results. And therein lies the promise of this new science. DNA, used in this way, can restore a remarkable amount of information about the ancestors whose traces we carry around every day in our genomes. The multitude of population clusters, regions and genetic groups reflected in DNA tests counters existing narratives that try to reduce the astonishing variety of the human community to the four or five socially constructed races of man about which prior generations of students learned in biology class.

That's why, as historians who study race, we believe that we're once again entering a new era. If, throughout the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, science put an enormous amount of effort into dividing the human species into separate categories, 21st-century genetic analysis promises to reveal just how meaningless those categories are - and how connected we've been all along.

At a time when our society is deeply divided and when a surge of antisemitic, anti-Asian, Islamophobic and anti-Black racism threatens the social fabric, it feels urgent that we develop new language for discussing the relationship between identity, ancestry, history and science. DNA analysis could help create that language by offering more nuanced ways of looking at individual origins and a more unifying narrative about our shared heritage

But, of course, where there is promise, there is also peril. Race is, to steal a line from Wordsworth, "too much with us." Its history is too long, its presence and usage too common, for it to magically disappear anytime soon. While, biologically speaking, the idea of individual human races with different origins is as farcical as the medieval belief that elves cause hiccups, the social reality of race is undeniable. And genetics - or, for that matter, any science - has the potential to be misused, co-opted by racist ideologies and employed to bolster harmful narratives about racial purity or biological superiority.

But if we can, at the very least, embrace the understanding that race (a toxic social construction) and ancestry (a shared genetic history) are not only distinct but also fundamentally opposed - and teach that in our classrooms - it could go a long way toward freeing us from some of the binds in which scientific racism have trapped us.

The stories embedded in our genes beg to be told. They tell of ancestral diversity that stretches back thousands of years and ultimately underscores all that we - despite superficial physical differences - have in common.

Dr. Gates is the director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Dr. Curran is a professor at Wesleyan University. They edited the forthcoming book "Who's Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter From the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race."
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Opinion | We Need a New Language for Talking About Race

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Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Dr. Gates is a professor at Harvard University. Dr. Curran is a professor at Wesleyan University. They edited the forthcoming book "Who's Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter From the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race."

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http://newsocialist.org.uk/transmissions/not-racism/

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What is ‘not racism’? This short comic by Petroglyph Studios and Alana Lentin explains how this new form of discursive racist violence can operate.

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"make up a story...for our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul." - toni morrison

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"make up a story...for our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul."

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Addressing Race, Culture, and Structural Inequality in Medical Education: A Guide for Revising Teaching Cases

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Addressing Race, Culture, and Structural Inequality in Medical Education: A Guide for Revising Teaching Cases

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Understanding Critical Whiteness Studies: Harmful or Helpful in the Struggle for Racial Equity in the Academy?

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Understanding Critical Whiteness Studies: Harmful or Helpful in the Struggle for Racial Equity in the Academy?

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Michael Cole

Part of the Palgrave Studies in Race, Inequality and Social Justice in Education book series (PSRISJE)

Abstract

Focusing on the hazards and benefits that come with a critical interrogation of Whiteness, the chapter outlines its purpose and framework, and draws attention to the crucial need for it to be symbiotic with intersectional analysis and anti-colonial, anti-capitalist scholarship. This chapter concludes with a schematic framework that offers a way through the problems encountered by fixations with White personal shame or growth, towards an eradication of anti-Black racism in higher education that is served-not blunted-by individual grapples with White privilege, White guilt and White fragility. Cole also offers a practical insight into his own attempts at anti-racist praxis in the Higher Education. Cole proposes an anti-colonial schema of authentic engagement with Critical Whiteness Studies that centres Black radicalism for a positive way forward.

Keywords

Critical whiteness Race Diversity Inclusion

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References

1. Morrison, T (1987) in Mao, W. & Zhang, M. (2009) "Beloved" as an oppositional gaze. English Language Teaching, 2(3), pp.26-34.

2. Sivanandan, A. (1984). Introduction challenging racism: Strategies for the '80s.

3. Willet, C. (2007). Overcoming habits of whiteliness: Reading Shannon Sullivan's revealing whiteness. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, New Series, 21(3), 210-217. www.jstor.org/stable/25670663

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Understanding Critical Whiteness Studies: Harmful or Helpful in the Struggle for Racial Equity in the Academy?

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Michael Cole Part of the Palgrave Studies in Race, Inequality and Social Justice in Education book series (PSRISJE) Focusing on the hazards and benefits that come with a critical interrogation of Whiteness, the chapter outlines its purpose and framework, and draws attention to the crucial need for it to be symbiotic with intersectional analysis and anti-colonial, anti-capitalist scholarship.

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What do minoritised students think about the awarding gap?

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What do minoritised students think about the awarding gap?

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ABSTRACT
In UK higher education, minority ethnic students are less likely to graduate with a good degree than their White British counterparts, even when prior attainment is considered. Until recently, concerns about this ethnicity degree awarding gap have not received the research attention it deserves. In this paper, we contribute to this gap in knowledge with a focus on how students make sense of the difference in degree outcomes by ethnicity. Informed by 69 in-depth interviews with minority and majority ethnic students at a UK university, we explore their views towards the ethnicity degree awarding gap, why it exists and what would be their solution to reduce this difference. Although some students perceived the awarding gap as a reflection of individual aptitude, others have attributed social barriers for degree outcome differences. We present five recommendations as suggested by students for policy and practice. Firstly, the provision of greater economic support for minority ethnic students, which will improve access and a more diverse student population. Secondly, to establish an institutional commitment to challenge and eradicate all forms of racism on campus, including microaggressions. Thirdly, to increase representation of minority ethnic staff and students in higher education to improve students' sense of belongings and aspirations, with the emphasis on greater staff diversity. Fourthly, to diversify the curriculum with a wider range of values and perspectives incorporated into teaching. Finally, universities need to be proactive and reflective to ensure structural barriers are reduced or eliminated through additional support or alternative provisions.

Background

Until recently, including the resurgence of the #blacklivesmatter movement in 2020, public engagement with the inequalities of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) people in the UK remains arguably limited, despite evidence of disparity from health to housing to education (Bryne, Alexander, Khan, Nazroo, & Shankley, ). Although educational research on ethnic inequalities has been around since at least the 1980s (Troyna ), this pool of research has stagnated, especially on post-compulsory education. Whilst educational studies on 'race'/ethnicity exist (see Singh's review in 2009), considerably more studies have examined inequalities of social class and gender, including those with an intersectional perspective or with a broader focus on non-traditional students (e.g. Leathwood and Read ; Reay, David, and Ball ; Reay, Crozier, and Clayton ; Wong ; Wong and Chiu ). In short, the university experiences of minority ethnic students merit further research, despite growing awareness of structural and institutional inequalities as experienced by ethnic minorities, especially within UK higher education (Arday and Mirza ; Bunce et al. ; Mahmud and Gagnon ).

In the last few years, research attention on the experiences and outcomes of UK minority ethnic university students has gained momentum, especially studies led by student unions (e.g. Bristol SU ; Miller ; SOAS SU ; UUK/NUS ). A rising number of universities have also become members of AdvanceHe's Race Equality Charter (n = 75, although only 17 award holders by January 2021), which indicates a greater public commitment to race equality.

Despite institutional pledges to tackle racism, the standout concern continues to be the gap in 'good' degree outcomes (i.e. a first or upper-second-class degree classification) between white British and UK minority ethnic students. In 2019, the proportion of white students who graduated with a first or upper second-class degree was 81.4%, but this proportion fell to 58% amongst black African graduates, which equates to a 23.4%-point gap (AdvanceHE ). More concerning, an 'unexplained gap' still exists even when students' prior attainment (e.g. A-level grades or UCAS entry points) is considered. Albeit marginal improvements, ongoing actions to tackle racial and ethnic disparities in UK higher education fall short of the Office for Student's sector-wide key performance measure, which is to:

eliminate the unexplained gap in degree outcomes (1sts or 2:1s) between white students and black students by 2024-25, and to eliminate the absolute gap (the gap caused by both structural and unexplained factors) by 2030-31ʹ (OfS , 4).

Contributing to a gap in the literature, this paper presents an empirical account of what students think about the ethnicity degree awarding gap, including a focus on why they think there are differences in degree outcomes as well as their suggestions to reduce this awarding gap. The views of students - from minority and majority ethnic backgrounds - are under-researched in this context and will provide us with new insights and perspectives as universities continue to grapple with the challenge to reduce this outcome inequality.

The ethnicity degree awarding gap

In the UK, approximately 25% of university students are of minority ethnic backgrounds, a proportion that is expected to increase with the changing population (AdvanceHE ). Despite claims that we now live in a post-racial era (Yancy ), research continues to highlight varying levels of inequalities as experienced by ethnic minorities, including in higher education. An increasing number of universities and student unions have explored this issue, with movements such as Why is my Curriculum White? (Peters ). The ethnicity degree awarding gap has implications for students entering graduate-level jobs and post-graduate courses, as first class or upper-second class degrees are often the minimum requirements. Furthermore, with increased tuition fees, universities have a duty to address the awarding gaps and actively challenge institutional inequalities, despite apparent difficulties arising from the tide of reactionary conservatism to maintain the hegemony of the majority White population in the UK (Jones ).

Whilst other factors, such as gender and socioeconomic status, can also shape academic outcomes, minority ethnic students seem to undergo systemic inequalities that transcend other social identities. For example, Collins and Bilge's () book, Intersectionality, highlights the realities of multiple and intersecting inequalities, especially on how these are manifested in different ways across social identities, such as gender and ethnicity, and for instance, the unique challenges of being a Black underprivileged woman (see also Crenshaw ). Similarly, Rollock et al. () also demonstrated racial differences in terms of social class privilege, through Black Caribbean middle-class parents, who must negotiate or utilise different strategies and resources to maximise their socioeconomic advantage to support their children's education. Here, ethnic minorities are disadvantaged by being ethnic and racial minorities, even if seemingly privileged in other ways, which would reflect a society that privileges individuals who are racially white. Bhopal () explained that White privilege is fundamental to the structural apparatus and therefore affords undue benefits to the social hegemonic bloc and the majority White population, through 'the maintenance of power, resources, accolades and systems of support through formal and informal structures and procedures' (p. 19).

Here, we can relate to the lens of Critical Race Theory (CRT), which has gained momentum in race-related research in the West (Delgado and Stefancic ), including higher education research (Hiraldo ). The starting point for CRT is to recognise and accept that racism exists, with the aim to challenge dominant (and often, White) discourses that neglect or undermine the knowledge, value and skills of those from racial minority backgrounds (Bullock ). Solórzano and Yosso () argued that a CRT approach would focus on the centricity of race and racism with other forms of subordination, including racialised stereotypes related to gender, socioeconomic background and sociocultural influences, and challenge dominant ideology that exposes deficit-informed research in the interest of maintaining white supremacy, and in turn, silencing or distorting the epistemologies of learners from diverse ethnic backgrounds (Yosso ). Consistent with the intersectional approach, CRT localises the narrative from the perspectives of ethnic minorities, where subjects and objects are recognised as representatives of actual and lived experiences, as opposed to observational judgement (Gillborn ).

However, policy discourses that strive for meritocracy and social mobility through education tend to imply that all students start out on a levelled playing field, regardless of their social, cultural and racial backgrounds. While formal and explicit manifestations of racism are nowadays less perceptible in policy and practice (Schur ), evidence suggests racial inequalities remain prolific in the education system, and therefore maintained by rhetorics of 'sameness' under the semblance of 'equal opportunity' (Ladson-Billings ). The 'one size fits all' approach to education may rather underpin the barriers it promises to resolve, while suggesting differential outcomes in student achievement are consequential of individual agency rather than structural inequality. This would appear to reinforce arguments that hold the hereditary talents and efforts of individuals as the main contributing factors to their academic attainment and success (Plomin ). However, such a focus on individualism as the sole explanation for gaps in attainment overlooks evidence of structural barriers in the education system.

Yet, through a meritocratic lens, the ethnicity degree awarding gap may be explained through the Culture Deficit Model, a disputed perspective that stipulates that 'racial/ethnic minority groups do not achieve as well as their White majority peers in school and life because their family culture is dysfunctional, and lacking important characteristics compared to the White [population]' (Salkind , 217). However, the assumption of cultural superiority - by ethnicity - connotes a deserved right to elevated social statuses and accomplishments, which signals and justifies paternalistic and condescending encounters under the guise of cultural and social hegemony. It is therefore unsettling that those identified as a minority might be assumed as inferior or less deserving of support and attention. Having said that studies have found inequality presented as dominant-group advantage can at times drive minoritised groups to stay engaged in their studies, to overcome the existing barriers in their degrees, while majority groups are more likely to disengage yet achieve higher outcomes (Lowery and Wout ).

As such, we need to identify and tackle these systemic and societal barriers and appreciate the essence of individual experiences and how they affect the whole, as opposed to vice versa. Adopting a bottom-up qualitative approach could therefore work to identify the root of racial inequalities and microaggressions that minority ethnic students are often subjugated to (Wong et al. ). The subtly of racism can make this difficult to discern, particularly in large contexts such as universities (Singh ). Moreover, framing microaggressions as purposeful acts could assist in ethnic minorities feeling validated and listened to, instead of dismissed and belittled, which can result in feelings of isolation, exclusion and even self-doubt in their abilities (Ahmed ; Harris ; Smith, Senter, and Strachan ; Trugong, Museus & McGuire, ). This in turn can affect academic performance, contributing to the ethnicity degree awarding gap.

Existing literature has highlighted that negative stereotypes, which inform attitudes and environments, can have adverse and detrimental effects on a students' sense of belonging, and, by extension, their academic performance and achievement, leading to the intensification of racial inequalities (Chang et al. ). Similarly, the lack of diversity in UK higher education, from student population to the curricula, can also foster entitlement and the normalisation of Anglocentric perspectives, which can blind the White majority from realising the gravity of White privilege and racial inequalities (Leonardo and Porter ). Thus, efforts by institutions to close or reduce the ethnicity degree awarding gap will struggle if not substantiated by an admission of institutional racism to counter hostile and racially charged academic environments. Minority ethnic students appear to experience socio-cultural challenges in addition to systemic and structural barriers, which have led to a lack of integration, assimilation and conformity, and by extension has taken its toll on their academic performance and achievement (Dortcha & Patel, ; McGee and Bentley ).

To reduce differential outcomes, Fisher () recommends the utilisation of evidence-based instruction, rigorising curricula to emphasise basic comprehension skills and balancing modes of delivery and, inter alia, increased supplemented instruction to smaller class sizes so lecturers' attention would be channelled towards fewer students for better comprehension. Additionally, pedagogical reform is necessary to educate instructors by instigating 'professional development for teachers related to content, pedagogy, and working with minority and poor students' (Ratcliff et al. , 102). For instance, the creation of safe spaces that listen and engage with the voices of minority ethnic students can potentially counter systemic barriers and inequalities (Ong, Smith, and Ko ). These changes are believed to strengthen overall standard of educational outcomes, including the narrowing of outcomes between ethnic groups.

As the voices of students are still largely absent on their views on the ethnicity degree awarding gap, this paper focuses on what students think about this inequality in degree outcome and their ideas to address differential outcomes.

The study

The value of STEM is widely acknowledged by governments around the world. However, in Western countries such as the UK, there are concerns that the experiences and trajectories of minority ethnic students in STEM education are more challenging and difficult than their White counterparts, including issues of underrepresentation, subtle and implicit racisms and microaggressions, and racialised stereotypes (Wong a). The lens of Critical Race Theory would suggest that the STEM education landscape is in deficit of enriching its knowledge economies through its Western-centric curriculum and perspectives, which lacks students, scholars and practitioners from minority ethnic backgrounds (Ladson-Billings ). Indeed, the metaphor of the 'leaky pipeline' has been used to describe the relationship between 'race'/ethnicity and STEM participation (AdvanceHE ; Elias, Jones and McWhinnie ). Students from minority ethnic backgrounds tend to gradually drop out of the STEM talent pool. Previous studies suggest that widespread images and discourses of science/scientists as typically for privileged white men can contribute towards the general lack of interest in science for students without these advertised characteristics, particularly minority ethnic students (Losh ; Ong ). Yet, careers from STEM are often highly valued by minority ethnic families and viewed as a tool of social mobility in terms of attracting higher social status and earning potential (Wong ). The study aims to provide rich qualitative data to enable us a more authentic understanding of the experiences, opportunities, challenges and attainments of university students, with a particular focus on the views of students towards the ethnicity degree awarding gap.

Collected over two years, this paper draws on 69 in-depth interviews with undergraduate students from disciplines such as biological science, computer science, mathematics, pharmacy, and psychological science. Our recruitment and interviews were focused on minority ethnic student participants (n = 51), although we also conducted interviews White British students (n = 18). Most students were female (74%) but a range of minority ethnic groups were recruited, including Black (n = 8), East Asian (n = 8), Middle Eastern (n = 5), Mixed (n = 8), South Asian (n = 11) and White European (n = 9) and 'other' (n = 2). The study is situated in a medium-sized English university with a student composition that broadly reflects the national population, including the ethnicity degree awarding gap. Whilst each university is unique in their own rights, the case-study institution is neither extreme nor atypical in terms of student diversity and outcome.

Following ethical approval from the researchers' university, the project began in Autumn 2018 with a call for participants in any STEM undergraduate degrees, with an emphasis for those who self-identify as being from a minority ethnic background. Using personal contacts as well as staff emails from STEM department websites, we approached over 100 staff to seek permission and support to promote recruitment, including over 60 short presentations to students about the project at the beginning or end of a subject lecture. Further details were also disseminated through students' virtual learning environment. Although our target was UK-domiciled minority ethnic undergraduates, to be inclusive, we also accepted interest from those who self-identify as White British or as an international student. Participants were provided with an information sheet and a consent form to be signed and returned, explaining the research and the process to protect their confidentiality and anonymity, as well as the right to withdraw without reason and the flexibility to skip any questions asked (although no student exercised these options in the end).

Students were interviewed for an hour on average and were asked to share their views on a range of topics, including their experiences of university, the role of 'race'/ethnicity in their education, and their thoughts on the ethnicity awarding gap. We asked students to share their experiences and stories on the issue of race and racism in higher education study. For some, this constituted an opportunity to share or voice frustrations. For others, the topic on ethnicity was a learning experience, especially for White British and international students, when statistics of racism were shared as part of a prompt to initiate a topic conversation. Although discussions of 'race'/ethnicity can be sensitive and uncomfortable, our reflection is that students in the study appear open and honest in their own views and perspectives. We also reminded participants that our interest is in their opinions and reassured students that there are no right or wrong answers. The interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim, with sensitive details removed. An e-voucher was provided as a token of appreciation.

For information, the authors all have a social science background with no associations or interactions with participants outside of the project. We are ethnically diverse, comprising of heritage including British East Asian, Middle Eastern and White British. At the time of research, Wong was an academic staff with a departmental role that champions equality, diversity and inclusion, ElMorally was a doctoral student and Copsey-Blake was completing a Master's degree.

Data analysis was informed by a social constructionist perspective, which understands social phenomena as socially constructed and discursively produced (Burr ). Interview transcripts were imported into the qualitative data analysis software, NVivo and provisional codes were created as we moved back and forth between the data and analyses in an iterative process through which the dimensions of concepts and themes were refined or expanded through the comparison of data (Corbin and Strauss ). A coding framework was then established, with a guided list of definitions for each code after the authors independently coded five interview transcripts by relevant themes. These themes were then discussed and compared, with any differences on the application of codes debated until a consensus was reached. The codes were also grouped together into higher-level themes, corresponding to the study aims and purposes, which is to understand the lived experiences of minority ethnic students, with a focus on their views about the ethnicity degree awarding gap and the possible ways to address this difference. On the cause, students' views and explanations seem to mirror the agency structure debate, with responsibilities placed on the individual but also recognitions of social barriers and inequalities. These subthemes are grouped into two overarching themes, which we discuss below. On the solutions, students suggested a range of possible initiatives and policy change, which can be discussed as five recommendations (see 'Addressing the ethnicity degree awarding gap'). Within minority ethnic groups, we did not find ethnicity-specific viewpoints on the awarding gap, which may reflect the relatively small number of students within each ethnic group, and therefore our focus was on the prominent themes as articulated by students irrespective of their backgrounds. Similarly, there were negligible differences by gender or particular STEM degrees, although we acknowledge we did not probe into the potential influence of degree structures, especially programmes that include work placements or practical experiences (e.g. pharmacy).

Most students were unaware, and a few were surprised to learn about a gap in degree outcome by ethnicity when we used the national figure in interviews as a prompt to initiate a discussion about the ethnicity degree awarding gap. We asked students to reflect and comment on the degree outcome differences, including possible reasons as to why such gap exists. Given STEM disciplines are often presumed to be more objective (Miller ), differences in student comprehension and attainment could easily be regarded as a mere a reflection of individual aptitude, although as discussed already, minoritised students are often subjected to more social barriers than others.

Individual difference and aptitude

Through the lens of meritocracy, educational success and failure would reflect individual effort, ability and merit. The degree awarding gap, in the context of ethnicity or other social characteristics, is considered by some students to be normal, natural and nothing extraordinary because there ought to be differences in aptitude between individuals. Highly competent students are rightfully rewarded with high grades whilst less competent students would receive grades reflective of their comprehension in their respective degree discipline.

Most of our White students expressed an individualised perspective on degree outcome differences but struggled, when probed, to articulate their thoughts on why an ethnicity degree awarding gap exists. Most responses here were short and vague, with 'don't know' or 'no comment' the popular comments, which may also hint a level of unease or unawareness of the issue. Mandy (White British female) speculated weakness in academic study skills and said that 'grammar might be an issue which is picked up quite a lot and just like misunderstanding', whilst Rachel (White British female) speculated poor social integration might explain why minority ethnic students end up with lower academic grade:

If they're not doing social things [or] they're far away from home and they feel quite lonely then if they're depressed and anxious it just makes it so much harder to do work and to motivate themselves to do work because they don't have more of a life.

More broadly, Harry (White British male) also suggested that 'it might go down to culture perhaps, in the sense that like, different cultures have different expectations of what should be done', which might align with cultural deficit theory that focuses on what individual groups lacked (Harry and Klingner ). Similarly, Gamby (White European female) suspected that the ethnicity awarding gap 'is more of a social thing [because] ... if minorities haven't made the social connections, then that might make it more difficult for them to make it to the end of their degree'. Here, their apparent lack of initiative or willingness to participate in social groups or events were framed as an individual choice that have contributed to their struggles to adapt and achieve.

Some minority ethnic students were also unsure in their responses and seemed reluctant to place any blame on others for their academic attainment, and thus, opted to take full responsibility themselves if their degree outcomes were poor. As Nancy (British East Asian female) said, 'I think it's really down to the individuals' as she offered examples of her minority ethnic flatmates who appeared unmotivated to attend lectures, even though Nancy anticipated students with immigrant parents (who are most likely also ethnic minorities) 'be more hardworking ... cos their parents usually really push them'. Similarly, Carol (Black British female) felt that ethnic minorities often have to 'work twice as hard' for the same recognition or outcome as their White peers, which means, as discussed later, the degree awarding gap is beyond just the reflection of individual aptitude. The potential danger of this 'hard work' discourse is an implied message that lower-achieving students can only blame themselves for not working as hard as their higher-achieving minority ethnic peers, despite unequal starting points and barriers.

An interesting but potentially contentious viewpoint comes from Penny, an international East Asian female, who suspected that the ethnicity degree awarding gap was due to UK minority ethnic students having a 'higher risk, higher chance in abusing drugs ... or drinking for alcohol abuse'. Although this view is controversial, Penny's perspective may offer insights into wider social stereotypes and perceptions, especially in different parts of the world. Thus, further research is merited.

Meritocratic ideals, which celebrate individual agency, may empower students to believe that educational outcomes are fair reflections of their aptitude. Yet, as discussed below, our students also recognised that such perspectives can dangerously hide and neglect the invisible but active disadvantages that operate at the structural level.

Social barriers and structural challenges

Our students also identified a range of social and structural barriers that could explain the ethnicity degree awarding gap. Although these views were mostly articulated by minority ethnic students, some were recognised by White British students, especially those who have studied sociology or learned about social inequalities in school. Melony (White British female), for example, recalled that 'in Sociology we learned a lot about different groups of people and how it affects education, and it was typically ethnic minorities who have poor[er] ... quality of education', which is linked to family and financial resources but also wider racial inequalities.

I think your initial schooling and background in education might have a big factor to play into how well you do at university and the sort of degree that you end up with ... White people might do better ... [because of] better schooling and they have learnt key essential skills and then that would have prepared them well for university.

In addition to resource disadvantage, our students also recognised broader structural challenges, especially racism (which we elaborate elsewhere, see Wong et al. ), as a key factor in understanding ethnicity degree outcome inequalities. Racial mistreatment and microaggression, often in subtle and implicit forms, can be detrimental to minority ethnic students and their sense of belonging at university.

Shu (East Asian male), for instance, had concerns about xenophobia and accepted that in the UK, 'my ethnicity will be disadvantageous for me because [White] UK people tend to like ... their own people ... they will see us as foreigners', resulting in preferential treatments and unequal experiences. Tenner (Black British male) agreed that 'people will judge you based on their perception of you' and stressed that 'a lot of other people from White backgrounds just have no idea and would never experience' the everyday realities of racial inequalities as lived by minority ethnic people.

An interesting theme that also emerged was a perceived language barrier, with the emphasis on those with a non-English speaking home environment. The ethnicity degree awarding gap might therefore reflect the challenges that some students experience when assessed in English, especially in disciplines that also use technical terminologies. According to Rebeka (White European female), 'science is really hard, you have to know a lot of terms and specific terms and you have to be okay with the English [words]'. Similar comments were made by Kevin (Black British male), who concluded that the language of science can be exclusive and inaccessible. More broadly, Lazda (White European female) argued that:

Some courses are essay-based, and you have to write a lot and your grammar should be perfect, and there are like grammar rule that not every foreign people understand ... this is marked as mistakes.

Whilst competence in academic English may impact grades, some students, especially White British, also seem to have conflated minority ethnic students with international students, who are imagined to possess weaker academic English. Yet, the concerning statistics on the ethnicity degree awarding gap is for UK-domiciled students, which can be baffling since most Black, Asian and mixed ethnicity students achieved above the national averages prior to university (DfE ). Following this logic, either the language used in higher education is drastically different to schools in a way that disproportionately disadvantage ethnic minorities, or that language is not a key barrier as some envisaged.

On their experiences of teaching and learning, students were probed to comment on the content and structure of their curricula, especially on concerns that UK universities are 'too white' (Peters ). Here, our students generally believed that the nature of their STEM degrees are objective and should therefore be independent of any cultural biases and influences. For instance, Natalie (White British female) argued that 'maths is just maths ... I'm assuming it's the same in every single country'. Similarly, Ali (British South Asian male) was confident that 'in computer science ... we learn from these algorithms. It's not like the country, whoever discovered it or where it's from or the origin, that doesn't matter too much'. Yet, another computer science student, Nancy (British East Asian female), lamented the lack of diversity on the history of different contributors to the discipline. She noticed that lecturers 'don't really talk about many historical figures' and when they do, 'they mentioned Alan Turing and stuff, who was [White] British'. For applied sciences, including psychology, students appear more critical on the lack of diversity in content or research examples. Lutah (British South Asian male) said that 'in psychology, a lot of the stuff they teach is Western psychology ... there must be other research out there in other countries'. The suggestion here is that the narrowness of the curriculum can potentially demoralise minority ethnic students, resulting in poorer engagement and thus attainment.

Addressing the ethnicity degree awarding gap

So far, we have highlighted the reasons from students to explain the ethnicity degree awarding gap, which have focused on individual aptitudes as well as social barriers, notably socioeconomic differences, experiences of racism, possible struggles with academic English and the impacts of Anglocentric curriculums. Whilst the strengths of these factors merit a deeper investigation, and most likely the inclusion of various metrics and indicators, our emphasis has been on the voices of students and their views on degree awarding gap. When asked for their suggestions, most students agreed that universities have a responsibility to improve the outcomes of all students, even though individuals must also play their part. This section draws on student ideas and suggestions as we present five recommendations to address the ethnicity degree awarding gap.

In recognition of financial challenges and constraints, the first recommendation for universities is to provide greater economic support for minority ethnic students, which will improve access and a more diverse student population that can also promote their sense of belonging (Bunce et al. ; Dortch and Patel ). Farzana (British South Asian female), for instance, suggested that universities could 'offer scholarship programmes for people from minority backgrounds and stuff, so more people would come. I guess that would make it more diverse'. With less economic stress and concerns, the mental health and wellbeing of students are likely to improve, which in turn, can positively influence their academic engagement and outcome (Benson-Egglenton ; Gross, Torres, and Zerquera ; Nora, Barlow, and Crisp ). However, a handful of students, such as Georgia (White British female), felt additional or targeted support for minority ethnic groups (i.e. affirmative or positive action, see Weisskopf ) would be unfair for the White majority:

If say they had their quota for students, say on my course, that might mean that say if only one ethnic minority person did apply, obviously they'd let that person on, but then that means that White people would miss out, if there wasn't enough space for them.

Whilst there are debates on the merits and dangers of a quota system, and affirmative action in education more broadly, UK universities are moving towards a greater use of contextual data to widen student access to higher education (Boliver, Gorard, and Siddiqui ; Mountford-Zimdars, Moore, and Graham ) - an important step that recognises but also attempts to rectify unequal starting points. Although contextual admission is predominately underpinned by concerns of social class inequality, these principles, we argue, can be applied for minority ethnic students to acknowledge their lived experiences of racial disadvantages. Universities should therefore provide targeted support for disadvantaged students, although we appreciate there are concerns about student support provisions that may be available to some but not all students (see Zhou in the healthcare context). In practice, to strike a balance, it may be that certain initiatives are promoted more aggressively for targeted students even though it is accessible for all students (Wong and Chiu ). For financial assistance, there are few but growing number of scholarships with ethnicity as a selection criterion, which we believe would be an effective strategy to reduce the ethnicity degree awarding gap.

The fourth recommendation by students highlights the value of a diverse curriculum. The anticipation here is that with greater staff diversity, a wider range of values and perspectives will be incorporated into STEM teaching, especially away from Anglocentric curriculums (Bianchini et al. ). According to Mawiya (British Middle Eastern female):

[Staff] can certainly find something that is written or represents someone who's BAME because I'm guessing most of these sources are from just white dudes or white women. But I think they should try and include some BAME [people] ... so the student doesn't have to do all that digging.

Going forward

Addressing the ethnicity degree awarding gap is likely to require a long-term strategy with investment not only at the national and senior levels (OfS ), but also commitment and support from departments and individuals, especially staff. Going forward, we suggest that institutions wishing to close the ethnicity degree awarding gap ought to survey staff perceptions on the issue, in order to gain a holistic understanding of their awareness and observational capacities so to model an appropriate professional training module. This might include possible explanations for differential degree outcome, potential solutions, as well as general areas of improvement as recited by instructors. Since universities have different structural and socio-cultural configurations, the individuality of the institutions should be respected and accounted for to supplement existing research on awarding gaps. However, there are no silver bullets or straightforward answers because the issues are complex and intersectional, especially when we consider differences within minority ethnic groups. A range of policies and initiatives will be needed, each designed to tackle specific inequalities that contribute to unequal degree outcomes, considering differences across degree disciplines and the structure of the curriculum and its assessments (UCL ). We believe that the five recommendations we set out, if fully adopted, will make a real difference to the experiences and outcomes of minority ethnic students. We encourage further research and suggestions for policy and practice, but for now, we hope universities who are serious about the ethnicity degree awarding gap would at the very least take note of the recommendations we devised alongside the views and voices of students.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Reading.

Billy Wong is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Education, University of Reading. His areas of research are educational identities and inequalities, especially in the context of higher education and STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education.

Reham ElMorally
Reham ElMorally is a doctoral candidate in the Department of International Development, University of Reading. Her research focuses on gender and politics of the Middle East, particularly the role of political re-sacralization in subordinating and oppressing historically marginalized groups (women, children and proletariat).

Meggie Copsey-Blake
Meggie Copsey-Blake recently completed her MA in Education at the University of Reading. Her BA was in English Language and Applied Linguistics. Her research interests are in language learning, motivation and usage, and identities, inequalities and aspirations in education.

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'Fair and square': what do students think about the ethnicity degree awarding gap?

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ABSTRACT In UK higher education, minority ethnic students are less likely to graduate with a good degree than their White British counterparts, even when prior attainment is considered. Until recently, concerns about this ethnicity degree awarding gap have not received the research attention it deserves.

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What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition

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What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition

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https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/emma-dabiri/what-white-people-can-do-next-from-allyship-to-coalition

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All you need to know - Part 4

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This Is England: Ash Sarkar’s Alternative Race Report

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“No other country could have made someone as obnoxious as me”

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All you need to know - Part 3

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mong the first to congratulate the Commission on Ethnic and Racial Disparities on the publication of its report were, unsurprisingly, David Goodhart of the rightwing thinktank Policy Exchange, and Birkbeck professor of political science Eric Kaufmann. A 2017 working paper, titled Racial Self-Interest is Not Racism, written by Kaufmann for Policy Exchange, foreshadows many of its conclusions. In it, racism is described, paraphrasing Goodhart, as being "subject to mission creep"; we should talk less of racism because to do so is always to unhelpfully "pack an emotive punch".

Echoing this, the UK government's commission claims that "society has 'defined racism down'", "stretching the meaning of racism without objective data to support it". The problem for overcoming "ethnic disparities" is not the ongoing effect of race- which, following its history over the last 500 years, is best understood as a form of rule in which people are categorised in the interests of the powerful. It is, rather, the existence of a "strident" antiracism that makes it possible for "any act, including those intended to be well-meaning, to be classified as racist". Kaufmann cheers from the sidelines, scoffing at a "master narrative of noble struggle by oppressed minorities and their virtuous white allies against a racist white society".

The publication of the commission's report is the culmination of a long campaign to discredit antiracism. It is part of a general strategy, not confined to the UK, to blame those who speak out against racism for the very social divisions that they're identifying. From this perverse point of view, people who experience, study and challenge racism - not those responsible for maintaining and reproducing it - keep it alive. Every factor can be used to explain racism but race itself.

To claim that an event, policy, or action is "not racist" has become so common that, contrary to the claims of the report, it is rare to see an officialacknowledgment that racism ever occurs. " Not racism" goes beyond the mere denial of racism; rather racism is redefined in ways that contradict the experiences of those affected by it - experiences that are discounted as not objective enough to provide a trustworthy definition. Years of scholarship and activism are thrown out and replaced by an interpretation of racism that separates it from social class, geography and other factors, as though it were impossible to be affected by race, economic and place-based inequalities at the same time. As the late cultural theorist Stuart Hall put it, "race is the modality in which class is lived". It is impossible to neatly disentangle the ways in which people are stratified.

For the report's authors, young people who insist that institutional racism continues to structure British social life will achieve nothing other than alienating the "decent centre-ground", as if the goal of antiracism was to assuage the feelings of white people, as part of an electoral strategy. As pointed out by the Runnymede Trust's Halima Begum, this is not a report addressed to those who experience racism; it was designed to send a message to those who believe that the opposition to racism is a zero-sum scramble for recognition and resources in which white people are losing out.

Racism constantlyadapts to time and place, refusing "to stay still" as the late founder of the Institute of Race Relations Ambalavaner Sivanandan put it. In mainstream public discourse, race is narrowly defined according to a biological interpretation taken from racial pseudo-science itself. This view, for example, breeds the commonly held opinion that it is not racist to voice opposition to Muslims because "Islam is not a race". In fact, no one is "a race" because race is a bogus concept, but people are racialised: racial meaning about their supposed inferiority is attached to them, justifying their exploitation and domination. This is seen in the practices that single them out, such as the suspicion of all Muslims as potential terrorists.

However, the report has an understanding of racism as frozen in the past and never changing.So, it seems that if racism today does not precisely mirror the experiences of the report's middle-aged authors, it is not racism. In particular, their understanding of racism is narrowly based on individual economic advancement. So, because some members of ethnic minorities experience success in terms of income or educational attainment, then racism's persistence for some groups, including migrants and asylum seekers - the latter are mentioned nowhere in the report - can be effectively ignored.

The terms of "not racism" posit that racism, if it exists at all, lies predominantly in the mind as, quoting Goodhart, an "irrational hatred, fear or contempt for another group". Because few will admit to having a "racist bone" in their body, it is easy to discount the much less declarative forms of racism that persist and which make those governed by it vulnerable to "premature death", as the scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore explains it. After all, the trigger for the report was the global protests for Black lives that exploded after the death of George Floyd, in the midst of a pandemic that continues to have a disproportionately morbid effect on poor racialised people. In the report's telling, and in that of its cheerleaders, including Spiked magazine's Brendan O'Neill, the state's ongoing brutalisation of Black people in the US as elsewhere, the UK included, is really a story of social media-enabled "identitarian sects" for whom crying racism is a "gravy train".

That the report has been so welcomed by some of Britain's loudest opponents of antiracism should give us a clue as to who it was actually written for. For example, O'Neill, responding to Meghan Markle's revelations about the royal family, complained "British people are sick and tired of being called racist ". The Commission on Ethnic and Racial Disparities comforted them by spending 264 pages saying: "Don't worry, you're not." Thankfully, those of us who remain clear-eyed on racism see through this.

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The egregious Sewell report only bolsters those who want to discredit antiracism | Alana Lentin

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mong the first to congratulate the Commission on Ethnic and Racial Disparities on the publication of its report were, unsurprisingly, David Goodhart of the rightwing thinktank Policy Exchange, and Birkbeck professor of political science Eric Kaufmann. A 2017 working paper, titled Racial Self-Interest is Not Racism, written by Kaufmann for Policy Exchange, foreshadows many of its conclusions.

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All you need to know - Part 2

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Illustration: Sébastien Thibault/The Guardian

There has been a great deal of interest in the report of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (Cred), which reviewed pertinent evidence on discrimination in education, the labour market and elsewhere. My focus, unapologetically, is on the health chapter, which prominently cites my own work. Unfortunately, the authors of the report quote my views from the 2010 Marmot Review produced by the UCL Institute of Health Equity (IHE) - but they do not mention the explicit reference to race/inequality in two reports from our institute last year, Health Equity in England: The Marmot Review 10 Years Onand Build Back Fairer: The Covid-19 Marmot Review.

I focus on health, not only because that is where Cred cites my work but because my longstanding worldview is that the level of health of the population tells us a great deal about how well a society is meeting the needs of its citizens. Inequalities in health tell us about inequalities in society. The health lens gives me a way of evaluating which inequalities in society are most salient. For example, should we care if one family lives in a bigger house than another? My approach to that difficult question is: no, we should not care, if those differences in housing do not lead to inequalities in health. But if living in an overcrowded, underheated, unaffordable dwelling leads to worse health, then we should indeed care. It means the way I evaluate the Cred report's conclusion on the existence or otherwise of racism is whether it provides an adequate explanation of racial/ethnic health inequalities. (The report's heading is "disparities", but in the health chapter it sometimes lapses into the more familiar language of "inequalities".)

Its chapter on health has much that is good in it. It states clearly that health inequalities are not primarily owing to inequalities in access to healthcare but to inequalities in the social determinants of health and in behaviours. It draws attention to the problems of the term Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) - there are important differences in health among ethnic groups. I can, though, illustrate Cred's shortcomings in its approach to racism by its shortcomings in the way it handles my reports on health inequalities. In reference to the IHE's 2010 Marmot Review, the Cred report states:"The Marmot Review did find variations by ethnic minorities, however, it did not answer why the social determinants of health are unequally distributed between different racial and ethnic groups. This question was beyond the remit of the review but was also affected by the lack of consistent data collection on ethnicity in health."

That is an accurate version of our thinking in 2010. Our charge then was to examine inequalities in health between social groups defined on the basis of socio-economic characteristics. Indeed, in 2010, I thought that most of the ethnic differences in health could be accounted for by various socio-economic characteristics. My change in view was very much influenced by the experience of chairing the Commission of the Pan American Health Organisation (Paho) on Equity and Health Inequalities in the Americas. The report, published in 2019 concluded thatthroughout the Americas - from North America to Latin America and the Caribbean - Indigenous peoples have worse health than non-Indigenous; and people of African descent consistently suffer disadvantage in health and in the social determinants of health. It highlighted the effects of colonialism and structural racism, and emphasised the overwhelming need to deal with such racism in combating the social determinants of health inequalities.

This thinking on structural racism informed our interpretation of evidence on health in the UK, and we cited the work of Paho in Build Back Fairer. Had the Cred commissioners consulted the executive summary of our 2020 report reflecting the first months of the Covid pandemic, they would have found a more pertinent insight: "The links between ill health, including Covid-19, and deprivation are all too familiar. Less so have been the findings of shockingly high Covid-19 mortality rates among British people who self-identify as Black, Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Indian. Much, but not all, of this excess can be attributed to living in deprived areas, crowded housing, and being more exposed to the virus at work and at home - these conditions are themselves the result of longstanding inequalities and structural racism."

I think about these ethnic inequalities in two ways. The first perspective considers what causes the causesof ill health. Smoking, poor diet and obesity are causes of ill health, but the "causes of the causes" are the social determinants of health - the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age. Structural racism can be one cause of the social determinants of health - the causes of the "causes of the causes".

For example, we quote in Build Back Fairerthe finding that, for 17 occupations, the higher the proportion of workers that come from BAME groups, the higher the Covid-19 mortality rates. The "causes of the causes of the causes" means that some ethnic groups are more likely to have adverse social conditions, in this case working in high-risk occupations.

The second way to think about ethnic health inequalities flows from the intersection between ethnic patterns of disease and socio-economic position. There are health differences between races that are not fully explained by class; it is likely that racism plays an important role. To put it simply, these two issues may overlap, but they are not the same thing. The report notes that some ethnic groups have better health than others, but this simply reveals the limitations of the BAME classification; it does not disprove the role of racism.

It is surprising that the Cred report's authors are so ready to dismiss structural racism when they quote "experts advise us that mental ill health has little to do with genetic predisposition but rather is to do with adverse social circumstances, including racism and hardship". The debate is more than semantic. The report's authors recognise the importance of social determinants of health but want to look downstream at what individuals and communities can do for themselves. What? If you find yourself in unaffordable housing or in-work poverty, do what you can to get out of it? Those of us who recognise that the nature of society is vital want to look upstream to the social structures that have such powerful influences on health and wellbeing. Achieving a fair distribution of health among social and ethnic groups will be a sign that we have changed society for the better.
Opinion

If the authors had referred to my latest research, they would not have been so quick to dismiss this crucial factor

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The Sewell report cited my work - just not the parts highlighting structural racism

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There has been a great deal of interest in the report of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (Cred), which reviewed pertinent evidence on discrimination in education, the labour market and elsewhere. My focus, unapologetically, is on the health chapter, which prominently cites my own work.

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All you need to know - Part 1

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Many of us felt the chaotic charge towards self-destruction, in a desperate attempt to claw back a semblance of an historic power and global prestige, was the start of 'empire's endgame'. Electing a hard-right buffoon to the White House and Downing Street were just two elements of a wave of nationalist and proto-fascist electoral victories which had also spread across the Global South in the last decade. Seeking to rid late capitalism of what remained of its social liberalism - principally, a degree of tolerance for minoritised people and the final vestiges of welfarism - the proposed path to national glory was reborn. The slogans 'Make America Great Again' and 'Take Back Control' in the US and Britain respectively, spoke to a perceived decline of white supremacy and nostalgia for imperial influence. These desperate clamours of nationalism, as Sivamohan Valluvan puts it, throw scandal, absurdity, violence and the renewed resistance from the left, back into a chaotic political arena.

The claims of the Sewell Report might be understood as a continuation of this trend, speaking primarily to those anxious and unsettled by the apparent loss of imperial/white status. Indeed, the report had two separate messages tailored to two different audiences. To the newly won over segments of the white and propertied voting base, the message was: do not worry about the scenes of civil unrest you see on your television, we have got your back. To the young, precarious black and brown led movements burgeoning in the streets (also taking into account the Policing and Crime Bill) say: this path you are starting down will not have a pretty end, so stop now while you still can. In this framing, responding to hugely disproportionate Covid-19 deaths, unemployment, poverty and experiences of ongoing state violence among black and brown communities with 'Racism? What racism?' starts to make a kind of sense.

As others have pointed out, it is a dramatic move designed to abandon all pretence of polite political debate. Instead, this is a move straight out of the rapidly assembled and brutally deployed playbook of the global right. Assert the outlandish, make your opponents come onto the terrain of your silliness, refuting your evidence-free assertions and in the process give air to your non-argument. Be willfully extreme and don't listen, because that guarantees the public conversation will be heated and divisive. As a tactic, this whole endeavour gives a dubious illusion of addressing racism in order to present any attempt to challenge it as a zero-sum game. Any gain against racism is reframed as a loss for others. And not a loss for racists, who we're told don't really exist anymore, but for 'the ordinary people' coded here as 'the white working class'.

As a move it is shameless and yet almost masterful. In a moment when the young are overwhelmingly critical of the violence of state racism, increasingly (self)schooled in the horrors of empire, with far less to anchor their precarious disjointed lives into the always fragile fictions of national pride, in this moment the state throws a lifeline to (older) doubters.

Drafted in to placate the imagined Tory heartland, the Sewell Report says 'See, it is OK to dislike talk of anti-racism and historical injustice'. More than OK, because in this zero-sum game any narrow space allowed to talk of racism is a squeeze on the very existence of you and yours. If you feel that there is not enough, that life is harder, perhaps that pandemic has made the struggle to stay alive all but impossible, well perhaps it is all this racism talk that has been stealing resources and attention from your legitimate needs. Yes, it is true that the world seems to be falling apart, perhaps that your world is falling apart, but don't you feel this talk about racism is getting out of hand? Could this new, demanding race talk be at the heart of it?

We anticipated this strange non-argument mode of politics in the book, but since its completion we have been endlessly amazed at how far this deployment of illogicality has extended. The point, of course, is not to convince. It is to allow the ridiculous to be given voice and to be defended as a legitimate view. It is to allow the pretence that bile against anti-racism represents a concern for class disadvantage. Indeed, this is one of many attempted maneuvers by this government to claim that undue focus on race has detracted from the real and honest markers of disparity in Britain - 'social class' and geography, as if the stories of class, geography and race have ever been separable in the history of modern Britain.

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Many of us felt the chaotic charge towards self-destruction, in a desperate attempt to claw back a semblance of an historic power and global prestige, was the start of 'empire's endgame'. Electing a hard-right buffoon to the White House and Downing Street were just two elements of a wave of nationalist and proto-fascist electoral victories which had also spread across the Global South in the last decade.

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Racial Capitalism: A reading list

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In the midst of an international pandemic and an economic crisis, a powerful anti-racist movement has spread across the world, demanding the defunding, disarming, and abolition of police and, in many cases, situating those aims in a critique and rejection of racial capitalism. In an effort to help arm this important movement with ideas and analysis that can help bolster its demands, we've put together this reading list on the historical development and dynamics of racial capitalism, as well as examples of resistance.

All of these books are currently 30% off.

In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world.

How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America is a classic study of the intersection of racism and class in the United States. It has become a standard text for courses in American politics and history, and has been central to the education of thousands of political activists since the 1980s. This edition is prsented with a new foreword by Leith Mullings.

In this stirring and insightful analysis, activist and scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor surveys the historical and contemporary ravages of racism and persistence of structural inequality such as mass incarceration and Black unemployment. In this context, she argues that this new struggle against police violence holds the potential to reignite a broader push for Black liberation.

A compelling case for reparations based on powerful, first person accounts detailing both the horrors of slavery and past promises made to its survivors.

A perfect introduction to one of the most influential figures in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and Marxism.

The Combahee River Collective, a path-breaking group of radical black feminists, was one of the most important organizations to develop out of the antiracist and women's liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s. In this collection of essays and interviews edited by activist-scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, founding members of the organization and contemporary activists reflect on the legacy of its contributions to Black feminism and its impact on today's struggles.

Racism is about more than individual prejudice. And it is hardly the relic of a past era. This scholarly, readable, and provocative book shows how the persistence of racism in America relies on the changing interests of those who hold the real power in society and use every possible means to hold onto it.

In this groundbreaking study David McNally reveals the true story of money's origins and development as one of violence and human bondage. Money's emergence and its transformation are shown to be intimately connected to the buying and selling of slaves and the waging of war. Blood and Money demonstrates the ways that money has "internalized" its violent origins, making clear that it has become a concentrated force of social power and domination. Where Adam Smith observed that monetary wealth represents "command over labor," this paradigm shifting book amends his view to define money as comprising the command over persons and their bodies.

This sweeping look at the history and politics of the US child welfare system exposes the racist system-from the "orphan trains" and Indian boarding schools to current practices in child protective investigations, foster care, and mandated services-arguing that it constitutes a mechanism of control exerted over poor and working-class parents and children. Don Lash reveals the system's role in the regulation of family life under capitalism and details the deep and continuing consequences of what happens "when the welfare people come." Including first-person vignettes of parents, children, and workers in the US child protection system, Lash also offers practical and cogent ideas for its improvement and transformation.

C. L. R. James was one of the most influential Marxists of his generation. His important contributions ranged from the subjects of Black liberation to contemporary philosophy and even touched on the anticolonial potential of cricket. In this collection of hard-to-find articles and essays, his towering intellect and engaging style touch on a diverse array of topics.

Detroit: I Do Mind Dying tracks the extraordinary development of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers as they became two of the landmark political organizations of the 1960s and 1970s. It is widely heralded as one the most important books on the black liberation movement.

In this classic account, historian Philip Foner traces the radical history of Black workers' contribution to the American labor movement.

In an era of stark racial injustice, Aaron Dixon dedicated his life to revolution, founding the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party in 1968 at age nineteen. In My People Are Rising, he traces the course of his own radicalization, and that of a generation. Through his eyes, we witness the courage and commitment of the young men and women who rose up in rebellion, risking their lives in the name of freedom. My People are Rising is an unforgettable tale of their triumphs and tragedies, and the enduring legacy of Black Power.

In this gripping political biography-the first written in English-Mike Gonzalez introduces readers to the inspiring life and thought of the Peruvian socialist José Carlos Mariátegui. As one of the first modern thinkers to discuss what Marxism has to offer, and to learn from, the struggles of Indigenous peoples, his ideas have an immediate relevance in the context of Standing Rock and other native-led fights challenging pipelines across North America.

A piercing historical explanation for poverty and inequality in African societies today, and social impact of resource-driven growth.

For as long as there have been rich nations and poor nations, debt has been a powerful force for maintaining the unequal relations between them. Treated as sacrosanct, immutable, and eternally binding, it has become the yoke of choice for imperial powers in the post-colonial world to enforce their dominance over the global south. In this ground-breaking history, renowned economist Éric Toussaint argues for a radical reversal of this balance of accounts through the repudiation of sovereign debt.

In this critical new work, sociologist William I. Robinson offers an engaging and accessible introduction to his theory of global capitalism. He applies this theory to a wide range of contemporary topics, among them, globalization, the trans-national capitalist class, immigrant justice, educational reform, labor and anti-racist struggles, and the rise of a global police state.

Collecting, for the first time, source materials from a diverse array of writers and organizers, this reader provides a new perspective on the complex history of revolutionary debates about fighting anti-Black racism. Contextual material from the editor places each contribution in its historical and political setting, making this volume ideal for both scholars and activists.

Black Toldeo is a documentary history of the African American experience of resettlement focusing on the particular experience of Toledo, Ohio.

"In The American Road to Capitalism, Charles Post offers a brilliant reinterpretation of the origins and diverging paths of economic evolution in the American north and south. The first systematic historical materialist account of US development from the colonial period through the civil war in a very long time, it is sure to be received as a landmark contribution." --Robert Brenner

An engaging, wide-ranging, and groundbreaking reexamination of the relationship between African American writers and the communist movement in the US.

The two founding texts of the analysis of capitalism and imperialism in one volume, with annotation.

For further reading, check out Haymarket Books on the Struggle for Black Liberation and Socialism 101: A Reading List

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In the midst of an international pandemic and an economic crisis, a powerful anti-racist movement has spread across the world, demanding the defunding, disarming, and abolition of police and, in many cases, situating those aims in a critique and rejection of racial capitalism.

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Anti-racist solidarity

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Last Friday and Saturday the East London rapper Wiley went on an extended rant to his half a million Twitter followers. The main focus of his tweets was the racialised figure of "the Jew," with various claims that "Jews" controlled business, particularly the music industry, and that they were "cowards" and "slippery." Wiley's rant extended even to Holocaust Denial and inciting violence against Jews. He was eventually suspended from both Twitter and Instagram. As always, if you look under any viral Jewish Conspiracy tweets, done by anyone, you will invariably see replies from Nazi accounts sharing links and trying to deepen antisemitic worldviews. Wiley even liked and retweeted such replies. Some prominent Jews and Jewish organisations, along with many allies and celebrities, launched a 48-hour walkout of Twitter with the hashtag #NoSafeSpaceForJewHate in response to the slowness with which the social media firm reacted to Wiley's tweets and the widespread toleration of antisemitism on the platform. Part of the action seems to be based on a widely held notion among participants that antisemitism is particularly tolerated by Twitter and by society, in a way that other forms of racism aren't.

However, many of the people fronting the campaign have had high profile and well documented instances of racism themselves. Amongst the campaign's backers are a rogues' gallery of politicians, journalists, anti-immigrant shock jocks and celebrities supporting the boycott, many of whom have long, proud careers of upholding racism. The decision to make such a prominent display, headed up by such a coalition, in direct reaction to a single Black man's tweets, and with the support of some of the most powerful figures in society, including government ministers, is incredibly damaging. It is harmful to Black people, to Jews (particularly Black Jews), and to antiracist solidarity.

As a Jew, I have faced antisemitism. My ancestors faced more. The emblematic, representative figure of an antisemite, both historically as well as the majority that I've encountered, have not tended to look like Wiley. And yet a boycott and a thousand headlines have been launched for this. Not for when the Daily Telegraph put antisemitic conspiracy theory on its front page. Not when Conservative politicians like Suella Braverman and Jacob Rees Mogg have barked and whistled about "Cultural Marxism" and George Soros. And certainly not for the countless racists, many of them with verified blue ticks, up to and including the President of the United States, who have had free rein on the platform for years to launch bigoted invectives and incite violence against Black people/trans people/Muslims/immigrants/Jews/Mexican people and more.

Ethnicising Antisemitism

Recent stories, and much longer-run patterns of discourse, have seen many people, including some Jews, attempting to "ethnicise" antisemitism. To construct it as a peculiarly "Black problem" or "Muslim Problem." This is not a new phenomenon but it does seem to be gaining ground in the current moment - not coincidentally amidst the largest global Black liberation struggle in several generations. The thinker Adolph Reed has aptly noted in his essay "What Colour is Anti-Semitism" that,

Anti-semitism is a form of racism, and it is indefensible and dangerous wherever it occurs. What doesn't exist is Blackantisemitism, the equivalent of a German compound word, a particular - and particularly virulent - strain of anti-Semitism. Black anti-Semites are no better or worse than white or other anti-Semites, and they are neither more nor less representative of the 'black community' or 'black America'."

Part of the specification of a particularised "Black antisemitism" seems to be connected to the seeming relish with which many white people, including some white Jews, see instances such as Wiley's outburst as an opportunity to call Black people "racist." There is a tendency to impose collective responsibility on Black or Muslim "communities" for instances of antisemitism (and for many things other things) in ways that Neo-Nazis like David Duke or Nick Griffin (both of whom, incidentally, not banned from Twitter) are never held to be representative of white, English or American culture. Except, of course, that is what they are. The discourses and violence that make up the long history of antisemitism are far more organic to the cultures of white, Christian Europe and its settler colonies than anywhere else. Attempts to ethnicise antisemitism today are regularly mobilised, often by non-Jews, as a means to derail and discredit justice and liberation movements and their demands. This comes with its own grim irony, given that justice and liberation movements aim at the undoing of precisely these cultures of white, Christian Europe that were formative for and continue to reproduce antisemitism.

Black and Jewish

One thing that has been constantly erased in such comparisons between racisms and by attempts to ethnicise a "Black antisemitism" is the horribly squeezed experiences of Black Jewish people. Soraya Nadia McDonald has recently written of her experience of being both Black and Jewish following widespread debate about antisemitic comments made by the television presenter and former singer Nick Cannon. McDonald writes,

When I saw anti-Semitic comments from Cannon and then Diddy's tweets of solidarity after Viacom/CBS fired Cannon for making them, I felt a familiar pang of betrayal, disappointment and anger - the same pang I'd felt two years ago when Alice Walker, a personal hero of mine, praised an anti-Semitic author as "brave" in The New York Times."

The positions of Black Jews and other Jews of colour are also squeezed, as much if not more so, by the anti-Blackness they experience within many Jewish communities. McDonald speaks on this, saying:

I struggle with my connection to Judaism. Entering Jewish spaces often means entering white spaces and being subjected to anti-Blackness and questions about whether I truly belong, an experience that's common among Jews of color. I don't live far from an ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in New York City, and when I see Hasidim on the street, there is a feeling of recognition, but also rejection, of knowing that to many, I don't count or I'm not Jewish enough. Jews of color often face a burden to publicly prove their Jewishness while white counterparts can take that part of themselves for granted."

Philosemitism, the Antisemitism of the Status Quo

Too many prominent white Jews have reacted to the rise of antisemitism not by trying to join in solidarity with a broader antiracist struggle but by clinging to the institutions of racist states and accepting the leadership of racist communal organisations. Too many Jews are not seeing antisemitism as being connected to other forms of racism, including the racist and colonial structure of Israel, nor are they seeing antisemitism and colour-coded racisms, with all their specificities, as being imbricated in the structures of racial capitalism. Too many Jews have seen antisemitism as emerging only, and in its most dangerous form, from the radical Left. Many of the arguments mobilised by Jewish (and many non-Jewish) self-styled leaders of the fight against antisemitism have, for years now, singularly failed to stop themselves from engaging in their own racism, while also relentlessly attacking and delegitimising left wing Jews. This past weekend, Wiley's comments have been met with flurries of claims by prominent Jews and philosemites that antisemitism is somehow allowed to flourish in public life like no other form of racism. This is an extraordinary claim in the world we live in. This claim of exceptionalism has been a constant refrain during endless debates about Labour and antisemitism in recent years. Wiley's tweets have been linked to the Black Lives Matter movement for no other reason than that he's Black. It has been demanded that other people involved in the grime scene take responsibility for Wiley's comments.

I hate when people try to hold me responsible for the words and acts of all Jews. Examples abound of some Jews in recent decades making alliances with reactionary governments and even far right formations. Such far right projects can work through a focus on anti-Blackness, Islamophobia, and "immigrants," dropping traditional antisemitic frames for a philosemitic admiration for Israel and a highly limited construction of acceptable Jewish identity. Figurations of "the Jew'' through time are highly adaptable and offer different tropes to suit various political impulses or subject positions. Discourses of the greedy or capitalistic Jew can often be less tolerated by some Western societies, though antisemitic conspiracy theories about the spread of "Cultural Marxism" or around the figure of George Soros are increasingly mainstream on the political Right, as well as among some centrists and even some on the Left. These discourses are peddled regularly by Conservative and Republican politicians, on the front pages of national newspapers and enjoy wide global traction, especially in online spaces. The antisemitic structure and content of such discourses are often denied (or remain deniable) and can sometimes be given cover by Jewish establishment institutions. This is emblematic of the unevenness of how antisemitism is currently received or censured in the public sphere.

When Wiley tweeted: "What do you do when you realise the people moaning about anti Semetic are actually the most racist ones out here?", in some ways it rings true. Britain's political and media culture has, in recent years, managed to transform a genuine problem with antisemitism on the Left and in the Labour Party (not to mention in the general public and on the right) into political victories for the hard right and the far right. Boris Johnson can write antisemitic caricature in his novel (the least of his long history of public racism), Michael Gove's wife can show off their collection of holocaust denial books and eugenic tracts, and the BBC's Andrew Neil - chairman of the consistently antisemitic Spectator magazine - can have his own foetid history of publishing David Irving in a national newspaper, and face no political consequences for it. Nor has the mainstream's supposedly deeply held rejection of antisemitism seemed capable of applying these standards to the legacies of rabid antisemites like Winston Churchill and Nancy Astor, both publicly lauded in recent months in the face of largely rejected counter-histories offered by racialised people. These political figures and dynamics of the centre and Right have been able to cynically wield antisemitism as a political cudgel to attack the Left and delegitimise struggles against anti-Blackness and Islamophobia.

As Alana Lentin writes in her new book, Why Race Still Matters, that "the political utility of antisemitism today is not to illuminate the operations of race, but rather to obscure them." We must apprehend the functions of contemporary philosemitism as a primary and mainstream form of antisemitism, particularly in the West. Such philosemitism, practiced through state power and media discourses, homogenises Jews. It erases our various diversities and works to hegemonise Zionism as an inevitable outcome of Jewish life, rather than as the product of European antisemitism, racism and colonialism that it is. Philosemitism, like Zionism, often erases or deprecates Jewish diaspora and non-Zionist traditions. In recent years we have been subjected to the ugly spectacle of liberals & rightwingers cynically latching onto continuous cycles of "debate" and "controversy" over antisemitism with a gross philosemitism that objectifies the figure of "the jew," freezes the Holocaust as a detached ahistorical event and cares little about other forms of racism. Lentin again,

publicly performing opposition to antisemitism and support for Israel - the two having been made equivalent - has also become a proxy for politicians and public figures' commitment to antiracism. Leaning on antisemitism as the sine qua non of racism and associating it singularly with the Nazi Holocaust, reinterpreted as a unique and aberrant event rather than the manifestation of a 500-year process, silences any questioning of this professed antiracism."

The writer James Baldwin broached these issues, with particular attention to the relation between American Jews and African Americans, in an extraordinary article in the New York Times in 1967. In it Baldwin explicated how the reception and discourses around anti-Jewish racism were fundamentally different to those experienced by Black people in American society. In many ways this is still true. The philosemitic public recognition of the unimaginable horror of the Shoah hasn't led to the elimination of antisemitism or the discourses that sustain it, as we've seen. But Jewish suffering is honoured, even if instrumentally, in a way that the horror, mass death and lasting legacies of slavery and colonialism never have been. Baldwin wrote,

the Jew can be proud of his suffering, or at least not ashamed of it. His history and his suffering do not begin in America, where black men have been taught to be ashamed of everything, especially their suffering. The Jew's suffering is recognized as part of the moral history of the world and the Jew is recognized as a contributor to the world's history: this is not true for the blacks. Jewish history, whether or not one can say it is honored, is certainly known: the black history has been blasted, maligned and despised."

Jews and the KKK

The tweet of Wiley's that most drew my attention stated: "There are two sets of people who nobody has really wanted to challenge #Jewish and #KKK." Wiley seemed to feel that he was bravely speaking out about Jewish power in a way that others were too afraid to. In his view this fear was comparable only to the fear people harboured for the Ku Klux Klan. In fact, the second Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s said pretty similar things about Jews to some of Wiley's tweets. The KKK are a useful example to show us connections between antisemitism and anti-Black racism at the heart of many far right and white supremacist projects. The Klan, in this period, were able to become, for a few years, a national mass movement. They had a huge women's division, were even more popular in Northern states than the South and were able to influence politics at the highest levels. At the height of the KKK's second wave the organisation had as many as 5 million dues-paying members. The historian Nancy MacLean in her study, Behind the Mask of Chivalry, has called them "the most powerful movement of the far right that America has yet produced." While the Klan's main target remained Black people, the 1920s KKK was able to grow its movement by also expanding its targets to Catholics, Communists, Anarchists, trade unionists and Jews.

The Protestant American white supremacy of the Klan came with age old anti-Jewish prejudices linked to Christianity but also organised campaigns linked to more modern, political and economic racialisations of Jewishness. They mobilised boycotts of Jewish-owned businesses, spread conspiracy theories about Jewish control over finance and popular culture, and they also targeted Jews with violence. The KKK shared correspondences with the growing German far right of the same period, with whom they shared an antisemitic masterframe. Reflective of a wider upsurge in antisemitism in the US, the antisemitic screeds of Henry Ford would find great popularity in both the US and Germany in this tumultuous decade. These formulations survived the Second World War in more marginalised far right spaces, where some fascist street formations in Britain and the US have linked their violence targeted against people of colour, immigrants and "native-born", to a masterframe of Jewish control. This white supremacist framing sees a global Jewry as standing behind "multiculturalism" and "coloured migration," heaping ruin upon "white" countries. This also intersects with longue durée discourses of Black inferiority that have commonly led white supremacists to suggest that Black people could not have been capable of organising and fighting for their own liberation without being manipulated by "Jews," or today by "white anarchists" and "outside agitators."

Antisemitism and the Petit Bourgeoisie

Modern antisemitism emerges through its relationship to the rise of a highly racialised and colonial modernity. It is co-constituted by the advent of nationalism, the popularity of racial "science" and the development of industrial capitalist society. Modern antisemitism has traditionally taken form and been driven by political movements, above all, of the petit bourgeoisie. Though this is not to say that other classes haven't been part of such movements. In fact, these tend to be political movements which seek class compromise, often through bonds of nation and sometimes through the pursuit of racial homogeneity. Such class compromise can be administered through labour aristocracies of national workers, and premised on exclusion of and violence towards certain racialised people. The racialised people in Britain whom Satnam Virdee has named as "racialised outsiders" have been at the forefront of autonomous worker and community struggles, as well as within existing institutions of the Left to break the hold of trade union white supremacy and to grow antiracist consciousness.

Class compromise movements of the far right, like the 1920s Klan, often racialise the causes of division. The idealised Klan vision of a capitalism that works for everyone was enabled by the racialised theory that African Americans were inescapably inferior and must be locked into lives of servitude and subjugation and that Jewish conspiracy of both capitalist finance and Communist revolution threatened the interests of regular white Americans. The historical projectability of the figure of "Jews" - that is, a rootless cosmopolitan people with no nation - has made "the Jew" endlessly adaptable into racialised figures of abstract threat. "Jews" can also be conjured as handy substitutes or human shields for the world-shaping violence wrought by white supremacy. It is the particular character of such "Jewish power" that makes it stand out in modern antisemitism. As Moishe Postone puts it, "what characterizes the power imputed to the Jews in modern anti-Semitism is that it is mysteriously intangible, abstract, and universal. It is considered to be a form of power that does not manifest itself directly." Through this framing we can be told that "the Jews" controlled the slave trade; that Jewish financiers, lacking in national loyalties, cause economic inequality or instability; landless Jewish radicals foment revolution and seek to upend social norms; or destitute and diseased immigrant Jews threaten the livelihood of the national worker and refuse to assimilate into national life. We can see from these examples why conspiratorial antisemitism has particularly flourished in contexts of social upheaval or political, national and military defeats. This figuration of Jewishness forms part of the ideological basis for a history of racial violence, pogroms and genocidal eliminationism. This violence has been most deadly when it has come to be backed by the full machinery of the state, particularly so in the case of Tsarist Russia and, above all, Nazi Germany.

This racialisation of "the Jew", though, is persistent and flexible, and has proven to be highly adaptable across cultures. Racialising discourses don't require state power for participation. We can still hurt each other even from relative positions of oppression. We can't ignore or dismiss the impact of racialising discourses in the reproduction of "race" and of racial violence. Especially when calls to violence are put on blast from large platforms. This recognition can move us beyond a limited debate about whether "Black people can be racist?"

A big part of antisemitism is a whisper game, the spread of rumour, the nod and wink that a homogenous and racialised social grouping is all-powerful and bears collective responsibility for so much calamity in the world. This is a game that started in, and has been overwhelmingly deadly in, white Christian Europe. But it is now a whisper game that, having gone on for so long, is one that anyone can take part in, including Jews and including Black people.

And again, you will often find such antisemitic discourses being expressed through a petit bourgeois subject position. A couple of years ago the Black British television presenter Reggie Yates made comments about it being "great" that the new generation of grime artists were not "managed by some random fat Jewish guy from north west London, they're managed by their brethren." He made a genuine, heartfelt apology for "reinforcing stereotypes" and unfortunately stepped down from Top of the Pops. Influencer and podcaster, Kelechi Okafor, in a now deleted podcast, insisted, however, that Yates' comments were "not problematic" as he was speaking "the truth." She believed that the reaction to the situation showed "the power of a specific community." Okafor spoke of Black people in the entertainment industry being "so short changed by the kind of people Reggie Yates describes." She claimed that "all sorts of ethnicities" are capable of this but added "the fact is, these [Jewish] men had dominated the industry for decades" and are "taking most of the profits." Black artists, Okafor said, "are having to work [their] entire arse off while they're keeping everything." With further allusion to Jewish power, Okafor stated that "if you offend one of the more powerful sectors of the community, then off be with your head" and that "people are demanding their pound of flesh, and I am very specific about the reference I just made."

We see in this case and we can also glean from Wiley's reference to his Jewish manager and big players in the music industry, that an antisemitic frame emerges here, at least in part, from a specific petit bourgeois perspective. Resentment emerges from the feeling that career advancement was being blocked off and that the earnings of a creator are being strangled and siphoned off by middle men and money men. The persistence of structural racism, particularly for Black people, cannot be denied. In employment, in positions of power and in professions, Black people in Britain are discriminated against every day. Sports and music continue to be industries where some Black people are allowed to express their talent, garner high earnings, and yet still tend not to reach positions of power or autonomy within those industries. This is white supremacy and capitalism but in these two cases it has been explained through the conspiratorial paradigm of Jewish control. Greed and control in various key positions of industries and markets become personified in the figure of "the Jew." Not by Black people any more than white people, almost certainly less in fact, but simply by people reproducing antisemitic interpretations of capitalism. This can come from people lacking accessible tools to discuss and understand race and class, from an ignorance about Jewish history and an ignorance about the harm these discourses do to Jews. The conspiracy, in such cases, has the expansive potential to open up to a wider panorama of Jewish influence but the sense of authenticity can also emerge from the telling of the particulars. Wiley spoke from long experience of the music industry, his was an exposition of truth that came from "an insider", someone who knows the industry and has seen how "these people" work.

"Anticapitalist" and "Anti-imperialist" Antisemitism

A huge danger with conspiratorial antisemitism is that it can operate with a claim to radicalism, a claim to be part of the fight for liberation. It can be snuck in alongside genuinely liberatory political demands. Wiley himself often tweets powerfully about the daily injustices faced by Black people in British society and about the mainstream denials or celebrations of the British colonialism that forms the basis of today's society. The problem is that conspiratorial antisemitism actually profoundly limits an antiracist, anti-imperialist and anticapitalist politics. An "anticapitalism" or "anti-imperialism" focused on conspiracies of Jewish control fails to diagnose the mechanisms and histories that have produced the subjugation of Black people and other oppressed and exploited people, as well as contributing to the legitimation of racial violence against Jews.

This has a long, deep history on the white, European Left. Since the nineteenth century countless British leftists who've called themselves Marxists, trade unionists, Labourists etc. have had their politics animated by antisemitic conspiracism. Particularly at the turn of the twentieth century, amidst large scale immigration of impoverished Eastern European Jews into Britain, and the intensification of European imperialism in Africa. Jews were continually blamed by Left "anti-imperialists" for standing behind European imperialism, particularly the Boer War. Jewish workers in Britain were held in suspicion as unreliable allies, sexual threats, and cheap labour competition who were unwilling or unable to assimilate. This was the period of the uprising of the "unskilled" worker. The "New Unionism" - and industrial unionism that challenged the dominance of the "skilled" craft union labour aristocracy - was composed of previously excluded sections of the working class in Britain like women and Irish Catholics. They began to form their own unions and parties as well as flooding into existing ones, becoming players in national politics. Working class socialism had arrived as a force in British society. But the rupture of New Unionism was a socialism conceived by most of its builders through an enthusiastic embrace of the nation-state. This left no room for some sections of the working class - namely Jews and workers of colour. Satnam Virdee rightly states that, "socialist nationalists' refusal to integrate the Jewish worker into the broader class struggles of the new unionism was a profound failing." The culmination of the spread of antisemitism among the organised working class in Britain was a cross-class alliance between a section of the working class, proto-fascist anti-immigrant movements and then political parties who eventually implemented Britain's first systematic immigration control legislation, the 1905 Aliens Act.

Black-Jewish Relations

Some of the tropes that have characterised anti-Black racism from some Jews or antisemitism from some Black people can arise from particularised histories of encounter. It can emerge from proximities in highly racialised structures of housing, work and community. Localised representation of "the system" can become embodied in a Jewish landlord or shop owner in a majority Black neighbourhood or, as we've seen, a Jewish manager, songwriter or movie producer in a specific industry. These can be about how legacies of migration and social mobility (for some) interact with shifts in neighbourhoods and industries, about the places where Black and Jewish people have been able to live and the kinds of jobs they've been allowed to do. It's also about white Jews benefiting from the privilege of being able to slot into a pre-existing and highly developed racial hierarchy and racial division of labour that they have benefited from in relation to African Americans, as well as colonised indigenous people.

A neighbourhood like Harlem in New York City is one example. Harlem was majority working class Jewish before it became majority Black when millions of Black people fled the South in the years leading up to World War One in search of Northern industrial jobs and to escape lynching and terror. As the racial composition of New York neighbourhoods shifted, Jewish landlords and business owners went from exploiting Jewish workers to exploiting poor Black people whom white supremacy and state power made even more vulnerable to hyper-exploitation. Discussions of relations between different racialised groups can have a tendency to de-class those "communities," invisibilise the class struggle within them and produce "community leaders" who act symbiotically with the social control imperatives of the state.

What can be elided in constructions of "Black-Jewish relations", as well as the erased existence of Black Jewish people, is the extent to which Black workers have been exploited by Black business owners and landlords just as Jewish workers have often been exploited by Jewish bosses and landlords. This is especially so in racialised groups who have been subjected to the kinds of ghettoisation and segregation that African Americans and Jews historically have been. Such dynamics of migrant communities and social control are a persistent feature of US, (there are different but structurally analogous processes in Britain) and, white supremacy as various migrant and racialised communities have joined the frontline of policing and exploiting racially oppressed African Americans. Whether it be nineteenth Irish-American lynch mobs and policemen, or modern depictions of Korean or Vietnamese store owners in majority Black communities.

Going back to that 1967 article by James Baldwin in New York Times, we can find Baldwin unpacking some of these relations.

I don't know if the last taxi driver who refused to stop for me was Jewish, but I know I hoped he'd break his neck before he got home. And I don't think that General Electric or General Motors or R.C.A. or Con Edison or Mobil Oil or Coca Cola or Pepsi-Cola or Firestone or the Board of Education or the textbook industry or Hollywood or Broadway or television-or Wall Street, Sacramento, Dallas, Atlanta, Albany or Washington-are controlled by Jews. I think they are controlled by Americans, and the American Negro situation is a direct result of this control. And anti-Semitism among Negroes, inevitable as it may be, and understandable, alas, as it is, does not operate to menace this control, but only to confirm it. It is not the Jew who controls the American drama. It is the Christian."

How To Overthrow The Illuminati

As we have seen, the "conspiracy" is central to the structure and persistence of antisemitism. And cultures, tendencies and spaces for the infinite production and distribution of conspiracy theory are a widespread and global phenomenon in today's world. The power of the conspiracy theory in contemporary politics has a significant impact on people's understanding of events across the globe. This is bad for Jews because it is Jews who invariably, eventually, stand behind the curtain in most conspiracy theories. And it is bad for any revolutionary politics of social justice because conspiracy theories misconceive the roots of power, injustice, white supremacy, patriarchy or the modalities of capitalist social relations. They also offer no practical counter-actions to injustice in the world.

Conspiracism takes hold of people's worldviews. It can operate across spectrums of class position, racialisation, age, etc. Its narrative structures can often dominated by US-centric themes which are then circulated into other contexts. While a country like Britain has its own long histories of antisemitism and of conspiracy theory, we also need to pay close attention to correspondences between racist and far right narratives that carry across borders. Becoming embroiled in the world of conspiracy theory is often an individualised and algorithmic process of foreshortened critiques of world affairs that provide simplistic causation, usually focused on malign elites, as a substitute for the more complex (or sometimes more simple) operations of capitalism and imperialism. It is a process of profound disempowerment for participants, many of whom (often white men in my experience) adopt the masculinised figure of the "brave truth-teller," some of which we saw from Wiley's tweets. People become enmeshed in a tangled, self-reinforcing and ultimately dangerous set of logics and argumentation that can be incredibly difficult to break out of. And seemingly anyone can become enmeshed. Even a genius like Alice Walker, with such heightened perceptiveness to the dynamics of misogynoir can fully go down that road of antisemitic conspiracism in her admiration for someone like David Icke.

A few years ago, a group of writers who describe themselves as "revolutionaries active in struggles in New York City and Seattle" produced a pamphlet called How To Overthrow The Illuminati that was specifically aimed at working class Black Americans. The writers had noticed a growth in the salience of conspiracy theory in working class Black neighbourhoods and wanted to help explain how this had come about and why it was damaging. "We've spent a lot of time with youth from the 'hood, talking about life and politics, trying to come together to fight white supremacy, police brutality, the prison system, deportation, and inequality in the schools," they write. "Over and over again, we've seen how these conversations and struggles get derailed when people start to say there is nothing we can do because the Illuminati controls everything. We would take a bet that this 'Illuminati theory' is probably the most popular political philosophy among youth in the 'hood today."

As they explain in their introduction to the pamphlet, there can be different receptions of conspiracy logics that correspond to the specific material conditions in which people exist. Here we find, in the specific case of oppressed and super-exploited sections of the Black working class, that conspiracy logics can, as always, help to simplify complexity and explain your world. They can also predominate in spaces in which Black Power struggles and other revolutionary movements with profound explanatory power of the world have been crushed or bought off. As the authors put it, "Illuminati theory came to the hood after the defeat of the black liberation movement of the 1970s."

The so-called "neoliberal" era has in part been characterised by some shifts in the class structure of Black people in America. In the absence of large-scale Black liberation struggle "a political void" opened up "in poor and working class Black communities." The writers contend that some "Black people had made it into positions of political and economic power," with the growth of a larger Black middle class entering into previously colour-barred tiers of government, professions, policing, military and business. Meanwhile "racist oppression and exploitation continued for poor and working class black people." In many ways it ramped up, in terms of incarceration rates, the availability of employment and the gutting of welfare, at least. "How could one explain this reality?" the writers ask. "Illuminati theory flowed in to fill this gap."

And often it was prominent members of a new, tiny, Black elite - the likes of Jay-Z and Beyonce - whom theories began to connect to the Illuminati. The authors posit that "from the 1980s through the 2000s, Illuminati theory broke out of its traditional audience. Instead of appealing to elites threatened by mass movements, Illuminati theory now appealed to the black poor and working class, and others in the hood. People in the hood started to talk about the Illuminati, the Bilderbergs, the antichrist, and more." They remark on the uncanny ability of conspiracy theory cultures to draw in such different political constituencies, saying "it may seem strange that the same theory would appeal to both white ultra-conservatives and poor black people." The writers continue:

Illuminati theory helps oppressed people to explain our experiences in the hood. Society throws horrible stuff in our faces: our family members get locked up for bullshit. Our friends kill each other over beefs, money or turf. Our future is full of dead-end jobs that don't pay shit. We struggle to pay bills while others live in luxury. On TV, we see people all over the world dying in poverty, even though we live in the most materially abundant society in history. Most people act like none of these terrible things are happening. Why does this occur? We start looking for answers, and Illuminati theory provides one. We believe Illuminati theory is wrong, and we wrote this pamphlet to offer a different answer. We wrote this pamphlet because we know people who think about the Illuminati usually want to stop oppression and exploitation. They're some of the smartest people in the hood today. Forty years ago, Illuminati theorists would've been in the Black Panther Party. Today most of them sit around and talk endlessly about conspiracies. This is a waste of talent...We live in a society that blames individuals for failing to succeed. But people in the hood aren't stupid: we know we aren't to blame, and that there are outside forces preventing us from living with dignity. For this reason, conspiracy theories and urban legends have been a common feature of oppressed communities in the U.S, especially black communities, for decades."

The pamphlet concludes about conspiracy theory, as we all should, that "people who try to change the world using Illuminati theory are boxing with shadows. The shadow is the shadow of capital, the real alien created by all of us, through the social relationships we participate in every day." And they propose, in opposition to the disempowerment and antisemitism of conspiracy theory, the potential of communism, which they define as:

the destruction of capital, white supremacy, women's oppression, lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender oppression, imperialism, environmental destruction, and much more. Billions of poor and working class people will accomplish it through strikes, riots, armed battles, and mass meetings against the system. It will not be done by a small group of "enlightened" people. It will happen-like every revolution in the past-through a mass movement against oppression."

The widespread traction of conspiracy theory is not just a technologically determined product of the internet age. It also demonstrates a deep failure of the class struggle, and a dangerous lack of antiracist literacy. It points to an absence of connection between struggles, between separated sections of the working class and between different oppressed groups. As well as being a symptom of political fatalism, perhaps a contemporary feature of the draw of conspiracy theory today relates to some of the specific restructuring processes that have taken place within many capitalist societies. Precarity and crisis dominate so many people's relationships to work and daily life. Precarious "self-employment", atomised individuals are told to be the entrepreneurs of their own lives and solitary paths to prospective "freedom" and social mobility are more common than participation in social movements and worker organising. In the wake of crushed organised labour movements, precarity encourages competition within the working class. The onus is on the individual to constantly hustle, to stave off structural unemployment, that is more often blamed on immigration than on automation and the logic of capital accumulation. In this hustle, as opposed to the collective bargaining and longer term employment in factories and firms idealised by many in the era of the Keynesian "Golden Age" (an age structurally privileged towards white workers as the basis of its broad class compromise), expressions of class antagonism often move away from an individual boss onto a hatred of self or a more abstracted sense of "the system", "corporate power" and "money men." As has often been the case, shop owners, landlords, pawn shop owners can come to personify the most immediate and recognisable capitalist class. In some neighbourhoods, in the past or now, these personifications of capital may have been Jewish people, or have been associated with other racialised figures. When conspiracy theory expands that to a world scale it is the particular historical traces left by antisemitism that make it such a salient narrative for Jews to be placed at the centre of a masterframe explanation. Moishe Postone explains that the modern antisemitic conspiracy theory's "claim," like conspiracy theory more broadly today, "is to explain the world-a world that had rapidly become too complex and threatening for many people." But it is the work of capital itself that exploits workers to create profits, never the Jewishness or any other racialisation of the human beings whom the relations of capitalist production flow through.

Concurrence and Disjuncture, Histories of Racialisation

There are many concurrences as well as profound disjunctures between histories of anti-Black and anti-Jewish racism. There are particular parallels, for instance, between the African American experience and the history of Jews in Europe. Both experiences have been characterised at times by ghettoisation enforced by state authorities. Both communities also have long histories of being terrorised by pogroms or lynch mobs, structures of violence that combine popular, vigilante racism with the active or passive help of state forces. Antisemitism and anti-Black racism have for long periods helped to bring coherence to racist cross-class alliances and ideologies formed through whiteness.

The majority of Black people in colonies were enslaved and dominated by European white supremacy for centuries for their labour. Jews, before some gradual and formal processes of liberal emancipation in Europe, were segregated not for their labour but were instead denied access to most forms of work and excluded in ghettos to be kept away from Christian majorities. Under Jim Crow, Black people were similarly kept apart from whites and extremely limited in terms of what work they could do.

The formal emancipation of slaves in the United States and the formal emancipation of Jews in Western European states occurred at similar times. Yet both freed slaves (self-emancipated through mass flight, strikes, armed uprisings and military victory) and emancipated Jews would find themselves re-subordinated in different ways, almost immediately. Both continued to be racialised by white supremacist national states and by the voluntaristic white supremacy of vigilantism and racist white workers, organised or not. This mid-late nineteenth century period sees racialisation processes take on rigid forms, imbued with ideologies of "scientific" racism and ideas of "race" being an inescapable destiny.

Formal emancipation opened up "national" questions about the dangers of extending liberal rights to Black people in the US or Jews in Western Europe. Bound up with white anxieties about formal rights such as voting or holding political office were deep fears that centered around the prospect of proximity between "the races" and whether assimilation by Black or Jewish people into an established (white, Christian) national culture was even possible. This is why some racialised discourses at the time were similar. There was a common figuration of Black men and Jewish men as sexual and violent threats to white women amidst the constant fear of "interracial marriage" and "race-mixing." Though, of course, there is no comparison in terms of how much more violence Black men faced for this. There was great fear of freed Black workers and poor immigrant Jews, seen as being nothing but labour competition to nationalised, white labour pools and their established, racially exclusive trade unions. These moral panics often took on similar structures, particularly in early twentieth century Britain where both Jewish and "colonial" labour were attacked and legislated against in the same period. Of course, states themselves acted to systematically prevent assimilation - far more so with African Americans under Jim Crow, as well as in the North where proximity and segregation were policed, and in many ways continue to be, through racialised and spatialised regimes that combine both state and popular violence.

James Baldwin here referred to one of the many disjunctures in this comparison, though, particularly in the American case, when he writes that,

The Jewish travail occurred across the sea and America rescued him from the house of bondage. But America is the house of bondage for the Negro, and no country can rescue him. What happens to the Negro here happens to him because he is an American."

Baldwin here speaks to how paths to whiteness opened up to the vast majority of Jewish immigrants to America. No matter how hard many of their lives often were in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as immigrants, as poor people and as Jews, they were not African-American and they were not indigenous people - a huge categorical difference in the story of America's racial regime foundationally built, as it was, upon the enslavement of people of African descent for their labour and the genocidal eliminationism of indigenous people for the colonisation of their lands. Baldwin puts this into context for us, leaving the choice open to white Jews, as well as to other whites, to be judged by their actions, that is: solidarity with the oppressed or integration into a white supremacist racial hierarchy:

The Americans are no longer Europeans, but they are still living, at least as they imagine, on that capital. That capital also belongs, however, to the slaves who created it for Europe and who created it here; and in that sense, the Jew must see that he is part of the history of Europe, and will always be so considered by the descendant of the slave. Always, that is, unless he himself is willing to prove that this judgment is inadequate and unjust. This is precisely what is demanded of all the other white men in this country, and the Jew will not find it easier than anybody else? The ultimate hope for a genuine black-white dialogue in this country lies in the recognition that the driven European serf merely created another serf here, and created him on the basis of color. No one can deny that that Jew was a party to this, but it is senseless to assert that this was because of his Jewishness. One can be disappointed in the Jew if one is romantic enough-for not having learned from history; but if people did learn from history, history would be very different."

This reminds me of an encounter told about a maroon rebel captured in the huge slave uprising in Jamaica in 1760 led by Akan (then Coromantee) slaves from present-day Ghana. The source of this story is Edward Long, slave plantation owner in Jamaica and a significant figure in the history of British white supremacy, and is discussed by Robin Blackburn in his The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery. Blackburn notes that "Long, animated by his own hopes, fear and prejudices, may have embellished the story", but that in itself would be revealing about the anxieties of the plantation owners. Known as Tacky's Revolt, the insurrection involved hundreds of enslaved people and free Black maroons who captured large amounts of territory, killing dozens of white people. It took months for British colonisers to brutally put down the revolt with hundreds of executions and slaves transported to other territories. We are told that one captured rebel, talking to his guard, a Jewish militiaman, said:

You Jews, said he, and our nation (meaning the Coromantins), ought to consider ourselves as one people. You differ from the rest of the Whites and they hate you. Surely then it is best for us to join in one common interest, drive them out of the country, and hold possession of it to ourselves."

Conclusions

I've returned again and again to the brilliance of James Baldwin and will do so now a final time as he ended his 1967 New York Times piece with such a knowing and resigned allusion to the fundamental dishonesty of middle class discourse and political ideology which is just as apt today. "A genuinely candid confrontation between American Negroes and American Jews would certainly prove of inestimable value," writes Baldwin. "But the aspirations of the country are wretchedly middle-class and the middle class can never afford candor."

We suffer today from pervasively bourgeois and legalistic discussions about and approaches to racism. In our society, the state sets itself up as the arbiter of a racism defined by speech-acts and "hate crimes" blamed on "ignorance." Meanwhile it is the state and capital, historically and continually, that set the conditions for the most deadly effects of racism. Their police, their prisons, their borders, their killing of Black people with impunity, will destroy and prematurely end countless more lives than the hate-filled racist troll or even the street fascist. A political and cynical philosemitism and, above all, the institutional nature of anti-Black racism guarantee that Wiley will face more censure in this society than the countless white people who indulge in public racism, often for lucrative, decades-long careers.

It is the responsibility of committed antiracists and communists to build the practices, the capacity, and the reserves of trust and solidarity to make interventions into these debates and events as they continually explode into the mainstream. As things stand, we are left waiting for large capitalist firms or for the law to intervene, for the state and corporations to act as the arbiters of antiracism and moral probity. At best such arbiters reflect a liberal gesture towards "equality", at worst they merely reproduce the existing racial regime, that is: philosemitism, a hierarchy of racism, the normalisation of state and popular violence against Muslims and the continuity of so many unchanging features of anti-Black racism. We need movements and struggles, as Black Lives Matter already is, that smash through the "frozen" notions of racism that currently prevail. A racism seen as being aberrant and individualised, a "cancer" or "virus" that strikes society from the outside rather than being symptoms of a complex of violent relations enmeshed in fundamentally colonial spaces like Britain and the United States.

The decision of a fascism-facilitating (and racism, misogyny, transphobia, etc) tech corporation like Twitter to shut down Wiley's account or that of a management company to drop him will not defeat antisemitism. For people to involve the police and courts will do absolutely nothing to fight racism or to properly educate and politicise people's views about this in the ways they must be. The likelihood is that these things also wouldn't change Wiley's mind or the minds of the worrying number of people liking his posts. For many conspiracists it will merely confirm their notions about "Jewish power." We need spaces, mechanisms, relationships and organisers who can reach people, particularly those from other oppressed groups, so that we're able to bring people in rather than cast them out. Of course this isn't easy and sometimes it won't end the way we want it to: with understanding increased and accountability being accepted for harms done. Ultimately, the wider objective must be to build on and strengthen autonomous antiracist movements which have the ability to build solidarity between different sufferers of racism. We need to broadly increase antiracist literacy and act preventatively to catch racialising discourses early and set them in their historical context.

One of the greatest figures of Black Liberation and one of the earliest and best theorists of whiteness, W.E.B. Du Bois, used racialising discourses to describe Jews in his breakthrough and rightly celebrated work, The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903. He described some of the new capitalists who ventured South after Northern victory in the American Civil War to exploit newly "free" Black workers as "shrewd and unscrupulous Jews" or "an enterprising Russian Jew." He wrote that "the Jew is the heir of the slave-baron in Dougherty." Du Bois' long life saw him always reflecting and sometimes changing positions. He at different points became a Communist as well as being a leading figure in the Pan-African movement. By 1953, when a 50th anniversary edition of The Souls of Black Folk was planned, Du Bois, having spoken to Jewish comrades in the intervening years, chose to amend the language he had used about Jews. He wrote:

As I re-read these words today, I see that harm might come if they are allowed to stand as they are. First of all, I am not at all sure that the foreign exploiters to whom I referred ... were in fact Jews.... But even if they were, what I was condemning was the exploitation and not the race nor religion. And I did not, when writing, realize that by stressing the name of the group instead of what some members of the [group] may have done, I was unjustly maligning a people in exactly the same way my folk were then and are now falsely accused. In view of this and because of the even greater danger of injustice now than then, I want in the event of re-publication [to] change those passages."

All people who suffer from racism should always be reflecting on how we can harm each other, as Du Bois did here. The way histories of racialisation position us is different for different people, in different times and places. Experiences are not equal nor are they the same, these differences should not be collapsed. Solidarity isn't easy and can never be assumed. Calling for solidarity from others is crucial to the fight against racism, and antiracism has to be firm even when it's in defence of individual sufferers who you dislike or have harmed you. Antiracist solidarity works best when it's reciprocal. It works best when it's based on an understanding of history and of current material conditions. It works best when it's based on the recognition that "your liberation is bound up with mine."

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On "Black Antisemitism" and Antiracist Solidarity

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Last Friday and Saturday the East London rapper Wiley went on an extended rant to his half a million Twitter followers. The main focus of his tweets was the racialised figure of "the Jew," with various claims that "Jews" controlled business, particularly the music industry, and that they were "cowards" and "slippery."

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Hesse on White Society of Spectacle

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Floyd's sadistic death was captured on a video phone camera by a Black teenager, 17-year old Darnella Frazier, who was on her way to the store when the death scene took place. Her video footage resembles cinema verité, distilling in exacting detail all the associations that have come to define the racial policing assaults on Black life, right down to the cruelly iconic sound of the phrase, 'I can't breathe', immortalised in the last words of Eric Garner, who was killed in a similar manner by police in New York back in 2014. The Floyd death footage has gone into massive social media circulation, and is resonating affectively across different publics, populations and nations, immediately making legible many other instances of police brutality against Black people, both historically archived and contemporaneously stored on cell phones and computers across many parts of the world: France, Brazil, Australia, the UK, Canada. The uprisings in American streets were sparked by these video forensics and were repeated in many places across the nation and the globe, wherever they were disseminated; periodically they have been met with militarised police brutality, particularly in the US, ironically affirming the structural relation between racism, violence and policing that are the grounds for the protests in the first place. The paradoxical racial problem of the police policing Black-led protests against the police killings of Black people is not lost on national and global publics.

The planetary digitisation of Black-led, multi-racial protests has inaugurated what might be described as the White society of the Spectacle. French philosopher Guy Debord once suggested that the commodification of Western societies have produced a sectoral consumerist vision that operated as if it were a mirror of the whole society; he called this vision-mirror 'the Spectacle,' arguing that it has become the unifying part of society 'where all attention, all consciousness converges'. In addition, Debord suggested that the Spectacle had 'colonised' society. What the protests have revealed in the midst of the Coiv-19 pandemic is a radical interruption of the Spectacle of consumer democracies and a convergence of global consciousness focusing on Black-led populations questioning structural racism, the Whiteness of these societies and their unresolved colonisation of racial life.

We describe this as the emergence of the White Society of the Spectacle because it is both unprecedented and unsettling; it threatens all of us with the militarisation of Whiteness through policing, without even the façade of waiting for consent, and the resurgence of street fighting white nationalists who feel their sovereignty tumbling down, highlighting the questioning of Whiteness all around them. The spillover of the protests against police killings into coeval movements to dismantle and disestablish statues and monuments that commemorate confederate generals, slave owners, slave traders and imperialist heroes has established a narrative that is beginning to captivate the media of white societies in the full glare of its traditionally disavowed relations and institutions of white sovereignty. All these expanded associations and antagonisms of the BLM protests illuminate the White Society of the Spectacle. They make the racist violence of white police and civilians visual and visceral, something that fixes our contemplation and interrupts our short attention span, for a never decreasing moment. It is as if we are witnessing the facts of anti-Blackness finally being archived, for posterity, rather than conveniently buried away under white amnesia as they were at the end of de jure Empire and Jim Crow.
Protests in the Time of a Pandemic
If anything suggests that there are Two Americas, it is the parallel and overlapping protests that separately surround what can still be described as White America and Black America. Not too long into the period of the COVID 19 lockdown, hundreds of mostly white people demonstrated in many state capitals were demanding the lifting of the lockdown, often brandishing automatic weapons and risking infection but also managing not to trigger a militarised police response. It is safe to assume that many of these protestors either did not believe that COVID 19 existed or, if it did exist, they believed it was not a serious public health risk. Later in the pandemic, there were also protests, mostly from White Americans, against the wearing of masks; they saw this as an infringement of their civil liberties rather than providing a protective layer to insulate their fellow Americans from contracting the virus through exhalation. This too, is revealing; some White citizens are more concerned about their abstract consumer liberties rather than any social responsibilities to their fellow citizens. It is clear that they are not afraid for their lives, either from the virus or from the police. Where these White lives mattered was all about getting back to bars, coffee shops, beaches and hairdressers; these are not lives who are contemplating, in the remotest, the prospect of annihilation by the police anytime soon. This White America is the pursuit of happiness America, now the Make America Great Again movement, oblivious to or indulgent of the history of White supremacy that had produced Black America as the protesting America, now embodied in the Black Lives Matter movement. The Black and Brown people who are protesting are aware that they might be at higher risk from COVID 19 than others in their country; nevertheless, they go into areas of demonstration where their rights of citizenship are not guaranteed by the police. But there is also another America involved in the protests, a seemingly Post-White America, in which differently evolving critical positionalities against White supremacy have begun to occupy the spotlight of mainstreaming Black protest. This version of a post-White America, however precarious in formation, may well be a product of anti-racist nation-building. It is undoubtedly an idea of America shaped intimately by Black popular culture, intensely attuned to and literate in the discourses of Black Lives Matter. In augmenting and expanding the national horizons of those mobilised under the banner of BLM, the multi-racial involvement of a greater proportion of white citizens than ever before in Black-led mobilisations has spawned protests that have become the largest social movement in US history.
Demonstrating the Decolonial
Despite the US being in the eye of the storm of these mobilisations, the BLM protests have become and remain global, occurring in societies like the UK, France, Canada and Australia, which all have long colonial-racial histories of degrading Black populations, while affirming white supremacy, racial capitalism and police brutality. Protests have taken place in countries in which officially there is no racism ( France); they have occurred in countries whose travel brochures present them as racial rainbow nations ( Brazil); they have occurred in countries in which racism is regularly dismissed as ancient history of the 1960s, 70s and 80s ( UK). These protests are multiracial; it is not just the friends and family of those directly affected by the loss of loved ones who are protesting. Those who protest exceed the usual suspects of activism and agitation. This multiculturalism is not, however, merely ethnographic or empirical: it is also political, in that the demands go beyond a narrow conception of interests and become the articulation of a principle that is general rather than sectional. The undoing of white supremacy is a matter of principle rather than a matter of detail. The issue is no longer the fate of the police officers involved in the killing of George Floyd, or the myriad other incidents of police brutality and violence directed against people of colour; instead, the protests have become a systemic critique of normalised colonial formations of institutional and iconic White supremacy. There is, in other words, an emergent decolonial horizon that makes legible what is being imagined in contesting the links of Whiteness between the colonial, the racial and the modern. The decolonial legibility of these protests appears in two significant ways. First, the recognition that police violence in the Minnesotan street can be linked through the extension of an equivalent logic to the toppling of statues of slave traders, eugenicists and the architects of the European colonial-racial enterprise. It generates a public space where it can be demonstrated that contemporary manifestations of racism are part of the colonial institutional and iconic inheritance of the modern world. Second, the Black Lives Matters global mobilisation is not only historical but also historiographical. It intervenes in the power-knowledge relation of Western societies, which in order to esteem liberalism, capitalism and democracy as universal deny the continuum of their lineages in colonial-racial institutions and thereby provide a corrective to the 'White man's view of history,' which remains hegemonic in national public spaces across the planet. The decolonial agenda involves the dismantling and excavating of the White supremacist foundations of what passes for normal in our social lives and opens up the possibilities of the anti-racist recalibration of new forms of social and political life.

There are no Black-led protests without pushbacks or backlashes from state racism and White nationalism in civil society. At the same time, Black political ideas can become recuperated into the previous liberal assimilationist ideas of diversity and racial justice that emerge as appealing forms of compromise when the Black political energies of activism are drained or disillusioned, or when alliances and coalitions become strained... The nascent Black Lives Matter movement's decolonial agenda has to find ways to effectively navigate these ever-present risks, in order to avoid a de-politicisation of the movement through the incorporation of policies that appear to promise but actually defer the dis-mantling of White supremacy. One of the polarising dividing lines that White supremacy historically drew and continues to draw upon is one that separates White people, who are elevated as people with history and the political, from Black people, who are degraded and subordinated as people without history and political. At this juncture, the question facing BLM is whether its historiography of the decolonial present can transcend the impending White supremacist backlash and translate into the sedimentation of an enduring politics of Blackness that expands the decolonial horizon.
Footnotes:

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Black Lives Matter and The White Society of the Spectacle

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We have been here before: another killing of a Black man by a white police officer in the US. It is all too common. This time, however, something different, something else also happened. The social context is both racially familiar and racially unfamiliar. First, the racially familiar.

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From whips to guns, the slave patrols of the 18th century are the ancestors of modern day police departments. Mr. Floyd's killer just happened to make the news, happened to have video footage documenting his desperate screams to his deceased mother for help from the other side. Mr. Floyd's brutal killing is not an exception, but rather, it is the rule in a nation that literally made black people into things.

Black people were rendered as property, built this country, spilled literal blood, sweat and tears into the soil from which we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe. The thingification of black people is a fundamental component of the identity of this nation.

Reckoning with this reality is significantly more difficult than wrestling with prejudice, racism, and even institutional or structural racism. And it does more than any of these concepts do to help us make sense of over 400 years of black suffering - of our unremitting interminable pain, rage and exhaustion.

Mr. Floyd's death is the story of our babies, of the numerous black children who grow up literally or metaphorically under the steel heel of a police boot. It is the story of our families, who since the Middle Passage, have had to suffer the unimaginable.

But when they kill our children, our mothers and fathers, we are expected to forgive, to be peaceful in the face of horrific violence. We are asked to respect a law that cannot recognize our humanity - that cannot provide redress. And when time and time again the law demonstrates it will never protect us, that it will never hold those individuals and systems that harm us accountable, we are expected to peddle a narrative that the system works, that justice will prevail.

Mr. Floyd's brother lamented, "I just don't understand what more we've got to go through in life, man." People are in the streets today because years ago we marched peacefully and belted Negro spirituals, hoping they would recognize our humanity. We wore Afros like crowns remembering our beauty. We put our fists in the air demonstrating our strength. We declared that our lives matter in every gorgeous dimension, demanding they stop killing us in the streets and in our homes with impunity. People are in the streets today because despite all of the people who lost their lives - literally and figuratively, in this fight for black life, the struggle continues.

So let's stop saying racism killed George Floyd, or worse yet, that a racist police officer killed George Floyd. George Floyd was killed because anti-blackness is endemic to, and is central to how all of us make sense of the social, economic, historical and cultural dimensions of human life.

kihana miraya ross is an assistant professor of African-American studies at Northwestern University.
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Opinion | Call It What It Is: Anti-Blackness

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From whips to guns, the slave patrols of the 18th century are the ancestors of modern day police departments. Mr. Floyd's killer just happened to make the news, happened to have video footage documenting his desperate screams to his deceased mother for help from the other side.

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If the address matches an existing account you will receive an email with instructions to reset your password

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Nahliah Webber, the Executive Director of the Orleans Public Education Network, is dedicated to disrupting education practices that negatively impact Black students and their intersections in the US and beyond. She holds double bachelor's degrees, Magna Cum Laude, from Sweet Briar College and a master's from Teacher's College, Columbia University, where she focused on racialized school policies and practices. Full profile →

The latest episodes of police murdering Black people have my chest burning like a building set ablaze. My heart is hot, my stomach churns. My head filled with black smoke. I am exhausted.

My body is weak from seeing, hearing, reading and crying over people who look like my father and brothers getting choked out on video ... again. My body hurts not seeing anything happen when people who look like my mother or me are killed by violent White men. The silence when Black trans- men and women are killed by police violently bangs in my eardrum. I'm sore from the hashtags marking yet another Black death gone viral. Physically, emotionally, mentally, I'm hurt. Professionally I'm tired.

I work in education advocacy and I focus on the protection, advancement and dignity of Black children and Black life. Black death is a threat to everything I work and live for, so when it happens I can't help but relate what I see, experience and feel to my work. When anything goes down with Black people I think about education and schools and whether I am a part of something that is preserving Black life or failing it.

As I saw the system choke the life out of George Floyd I became enraged because I knew the focus would be on the systems that produced this end result and not the ones that groomed both George Floyd and the cop who killed him for that moment. That the conversations would be about prosecution and police training, but not changing the places that socialize Americans for White violence and Black death.

The system that killed George Floyd and the system that raised and educated the cop who killed him are the same. And in the same way that folks are tired of the viral Black death-protest-fake trial-acquittal-rinse and repeat cycle, I am tired of folks acting like there's no direct connection between the schools where White children sit and the street corners where they choke out Black life.

There's a George Floyd in every school where Black children learn. Black children are screamed at, berated, surveilled and searched in schools. Black children are slammed and dragged, kicked and prodded in classrooms. Black children are denied an education and disrespected because of their culture. Black children are groomed for containment. We've got children walking on tape with hands over their mouths like prisoners in training.

Black children are suspended, detained, "demerited" and isolated in schools for trivial things every day. And there's a killer cop sitting in every school where White children learn. They hear the litany of bad statistics and stereotypes about "scary" Black people in their classes and on the news. They gleefully soak in their White-washed history that downplays the holocaust of Indigenous, Native peoples and Africans in the Americas. They happily believe their all-White spaces exist as a matter of personal effort and willingly use violence against Black bodies to keep those spaces white.

Yet whenever we talk about what's wrong with the systems that train and socialize young minds to become violent and depraved adults who, say choose to choke people out as part of their jobs, all we ever hear is that Black children, Black families, Black communities, Black-NESS are "behind" and stuck in gaps. Conservatives, liberals and progressives alike grow their careers and feed their families off of myths about Black deficiency.

If you let them tell it, Black kids are in terrible shape while White children are doing gloriously. But how can White kids be doing okay when they're growing up to be police officers, district attorneys, mayors, judges, media, mothers, fathers and presidents who take away Black life and call it justified? As Black bodies drop like flies around us from physical, medical, economic, and material deprivation and violence at White hands, how can we in any of our minds or metrics conclude that the Whites are alright? What kind of warped standards are these?

Because let me tell you something ...

And any school or culture that produces children to grow up like this is failing.

White children are left unchecked and unbothered in their schools, homes and communities to join, advance and protect systems that take away Black life. We never talk about this moral and human failing in White culture as something that needs to get fixed now. Instead, we pour millions of dollars into discussions, conferences, professional development, curriculum and consultancies that talk about fixing Black people. And I'm tired.

I'm tired of White people reveling in their state-sanctioned depravity, snuffing out Black life with no consequences and then having the nerve to tell Black children that they are "behind" and need to work harder.

I'm tired of White people telling Black kids that they need to be held "accountable," yet killer cops go free when they take Black life and White teachers go free when they miseducate Black kids.

I'm tired of White people taking their violent culture, standards and metrics into Black spaces and telling Black children that they don't measure up. Because who is really failing here?

Where's the urgency for school reform for White kids being indoctrinated in Black death and protected from the consequences?

Where are the government-sponsored reports looking into how White mothers are raising culturally deprived children who think Black death is okay?

Where are the national conferences, white papers and policy positions on the pathology of Whiteness in schools and how it leaves White children behind as adults?

Why isn't Bill Gates throwing billions into school programs teaching White kids how not to grow up racist and choke out Black life?

The federal government needs to commission studies on White neighborhoods that produce and insulate anti-Black physical, economic and political violence. City councils and state legislatures should redline those places and determine them to be "high risk" and unfit for life. School reformers need to lobby, plot and plan on how to disrupt school systems that produce, protect and reward White violence.

Go get Walmart and the Koch brothers to fund tens of thousands of recent White college graduates trained in anti-racism and dispatch them to the disadvantaged all-White school districts across the country full of future killer cops. Take your six weeks of training and be an anti-racist teacher in classrooms full of families that hoard resources, separate their school districts and fund the police to keep their knees on Black necks.

Simply, this time after you take off your Black Lives Matter t-shirt and recycle your protest signs, don't go back into Black spaces with your usual bullshit. This time if you really want to make a difference in a Black lives-and not have to protest this shit again -go reform white kids.

Because that's where the problem is-with White children being raised from infancy to violate Black bodies with no remorse or accountability. That cop didn't just learn how to snuff out George Floyd's life in a police training or on the job. He spent a lifetime preparing for that moment with his parents and family, teachers, coaches, neighborhoods and churches.

Eventually, the fires will burn out and the aftermath of the latest uprisings will clear. The heat in my chest may subside a little, but the grief will still be there for the next time. And unfortunately, there will be a next time because I've seen this episode before. We all have. Today we scream for justice but on Monday we'll call for better police training and a guilty verdict that will only leave the system-all the systems-intact. And we'll feel better about ourselves as we return to business as usual, preparing children for White violence and Black death, again.

I'm tired.

Photo by Sean Simmers.

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If You Really Want to Make a Difference in Black Lives, Change How You Teach White Kids

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Nahliah Webber, the Executive Director of the Orleans Public Education Network, is dedicated to disrupting education practices that negatively impact Black students and their intersections in the US and beyond. She holds double bachelor's degrees, Magna Cum Laude, from Sweet Briar College and a master's from Teacher's College, Columbia University, where she focused on racialized school policies and practices.

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Critical Whiteness Studies - what is it?

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Critical Whiteness Studies - what is it?

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Abstract

Until relatively recently the sociology of race and ethnicity, with a few notable exceptions, has been predominantly concerned with ethnic minorities and colour‐based forms of racism. However, developments across a range disciplines have seen a new attention given to the question of white ethnicity and the meaning of whiteness. This paper considers three discernable approaches to critical whiteness studies and is focused on developing a productive dialogue between the materialist, deconstructionist and psychoanalytic frameworks identified. The author argues that these repertoires differ in seeking to abolish, deconstruct or rethink the meaning of whiteness and white identities as they currently stand. It is suggested that each of these positions can inspire an interrogation of white identities capable of disturbing the more traditional focus of race enquiry to engender new theory and political practices in the field. The article concludes by pointing to some of the limits of white ethnicities research and argues for more international approaches to offset the parochial possibilities of a 'white studies' agenda. It is suggested that new geographies of whiteness can displace the construction of critical whiteness studies as a Western pursuit and open up researchers to a global interpretation and postcolonial understanding of such race markers.

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IN HER 1981 keynote address to the National Women's Studies Association, the poet and freedom fighter Audre Lorde described the perils of some such gatherings. She told her audience that "I speak out of direct and particular anger at an academic conference, and a white woman says, 'Tell me how you feel but don't say it too harshly or I cannot hear you.'" Lorde then asked: "But is it my manner that keeps her from hearing, or the threat of a message that her life may change?" Lorde was up against "white fragility," but the problem then lacked a name.

The person providing the name has been Dr. Robin DiAngelo, whose doctorate in education from University of Washington analyzed the racial discourse of white preschool teachers. An award-winning professor who has increasingly turned to being a facilitator of workshops designed to teach whites to frankly discuss their own racial position, she first used "white fragility" in a 2011 article. Her work has informed many experts in multicultural education and activists in social movements. In the book under review here, DiAngelo mostly lets readers figure out what white fragility is by trickling out interesting concrete examples, often from her workshop experiences. Through the years her most succinct definition has specified,

White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation.

There rages among antiracists and those who imagine that we are past all that a pretty fierce debate over the merits of asking people to confront, in an organized way, the advantages accruing to them as whites. On the right, DiAngelo is already attacked, as is critical whiteness studies generally. Indeed, one perverse dimension of such venomous attack is an ability to perpetually gin up outrage and white fragility around academic studies of whiteness as if it were a new and intolerable thing, a quarter century after the first such attacks. Now that DiAngelo's book has appeared on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list, she is almost certain to become the outrage du jour.

At one extreme of progressive opinion is the position taken by the political scientist Adolph Reed and the literary scholar Walter Benn Michaels. They discern in activism and education around racism the diversionary initiatives of a "class" of academics, middle managers, and political hired hands who, consciously or otherwise, divert attention from the hard facts of economic inequality and keep us preoccupied instead with obsessing about identity. This "antiracism/industrial complex" - odd that a nation so bereft of industrial jobs is said to keep generating these complexes - allegedly expresses the interests of a professional/managerial class serving capital. The counter-positions to those of Reed and Benn Michaels hold that stark racial inequality continues and that something like what feminists called "consciousness raising" has value where whiteness is concerned. Whites - the feminist imagination of a process with the oppressed themselves at the center is perhaps insufficiently emphasized in the antiracist variant - might then puzzle out the miseries, to others and themselves, done in the name of adherence to a set of unexamined assumptions and fiercely defended privileges.

Neither position very much encourages constructing a balance sheet regarding what antiracist seminars, study circles, workshops, and certificates might achieve. Neither much notices the differing ideologies and material realities under which they operate. For Reed and Michaels, the antiracist consultant is a class enemy; the more sympathetic, myself included, are sometimes too tempted to then suppose that the well-meaning consultant ought not be criticized, or even that the critiques are themselves simply evidence of a desire for what DiAngelo calls "comfort" and "white-centeredness" among the critics.

To occupy more fruitful ground, treating the contradictions and success of the book together seems apposite before I offer a closing section on the challenges and possibilities of antiracism training. White Fragility fascinatingly reads as one-part jeremiad and one-part handbook. It is by turns mordant and then inspirational, an argument that powerful forces and tragic histories stack the deck fully against racial justice alongside one that we need only to be clearer, try harder, and do better. On the one hand, as its subtitle suggests, the book underlines how wildly difficult it is for mere conversation to break through layers of defensiveness among whites. The sedimented debris of past injustices conspire with current patterns of white advantage to make white employees and even white activists very hard to coach toward any mature questioning of racial oppression. Their practiced (in all senses of the word) resort to defensiveness and even tears in squelching talk about such advantage is both reflexive and conscious. That very fact adds to opportunities for race talk to devolve into a need to validate the good intentions of individual whites at the expense of serious consideration of either structures of white supremacy or its impacts on its victims. Seldom can anyone learn anything.

On the other hand, White Fragility and DiAngelo's website offer lists, links, and rules for working antiracist magic, making the task seem at times straightforward and centered on the skills of the workshop facilitator and perhaps on lay people adopting and adapting her wisdom. "Robin DiAngelo is," Michael Eric Dyson writes a little oddly, in a generous and apt foreword, "the new racial sheriff in town." DiAngelo is able to bring a "different law and order to bear upon the racial proceedings." She can, he holds, deliver results by making whites own up to fear, pain, and privilege. If we do things right, the movement, workplace, or the congregation will change and grow, at the very least coming to contain better people. In tone and content, the book jars against itself. The can-do spirit of the workshop and primer knocks against the sober accounts of the utter embeddedness of white advantage in structures of both political economy and of personality and character. Such jarring is not indefensible. We live in contradictions and we do what we can. "Optimism of the will," the Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci enjoined, but also "pessimism of the intellect." The danger perhaps arises when doing ameliorative work well begins to seem like a strategy for deep structural change.

The subtitle itself suggests how hard it is for a book to thread needles that a society and the states of its social movements do not provide us with the resources to thread. I never blame an author entirely for his or her title and subtitle, as I have unhappily learned from personal experience how the marketing department can commandeer the naming of books. But whomever gave it to us, the subtitle of White Fragility offers a telling example of the apt severity of the book's analysis clashing with its search for a plausible fix. It promises to tell us "Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism," a real problem, but one deepened even more by the fact that white people do in fact drone on about race and racism. They speak privately, rehearsing what I have elsewhere called "whitelore" and to a remarkable extent casting themselves as the victims of racism. When a Donald Trump or a Rush Limbaugh markets himself as having the courage to defend in public what "you" already know and say, they trade on an extensive, if intellectually impoverished, discourse.

Thus the challenge only seems to be getting whites to open up and fill a void. At its best, DiAngelo's work knows this well and emphasizes likewise that whites are not in the main vexed by being actually fragile around race. The more exact and obdurate problem is that they tend to be sullen, anxious to defend advantages, and given to performing a stance of fragility. It is less clear that all readers will know as much or that allowing them to acknowledge what underlays their fragility will change their attitudes.

The author's keen perception, long experience, and deep commitment make White Fragility revealing as to how whites hunker down and huddle together for warmth. In movement settings, I have seen the term white fragility deployed to great effect, especially in the least scripted scenarios. In its appreciation of the emotional content of white identity's many associations with misery, it calls to mind the indispensable work of the theologian Thandeka in Learning to Be White, though the latter leaves more room to acknowledge that the pain of white racial formation is profound and real as well as contrived. As Katy Waldman has written in The New Yorker, DiAngelo has issued a necessary "call for humility and vigilance."

Though at times White Fragility envisions race as a durable category - even calling for whites to have more "racial stamina" in order to question whiteness - it does not imagine anything redemptive about whiteness and hopes at least for so-called white people to become "less white." It is uncommonly honest about the duration and extent of entrenched injustice and provocative on the especially destructive role of progressive whites at critical junctures. How often, in the age of Trump, do we read that: "White progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color?"

Nevertheless, for me White Fragility reads better as evidence of where we are mired than as a how-to guide on where we are on the cusp of going. Its pessimistic half convinces more than its optimism. Without more than appeals to logical consistency and to conscience, what lasts beyond the workshop is likely to fade. There is no firm sense of the politics that might be productively attached to the attack on white fragility and white supremacy to which DiAngelo is passionately committed. Between the book's lines, some sort of reparations for slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration would seem the logically desired outcome, but DiAngelo elaborates little regarding what comes after white fragility.

Part of the problem is a certain reticence to become curious about what antiracist training is, who it has as an audience, and what are its limits. Is the workshop the project of a union, a church, a radical collective, or, as is so often the case, an employer? This difference goes unexamined. It includes much textured description of training sessions, but perhaps too little about their contradictions and limitations.

Beyond the contradiction belabored above - the one setting powerful structural and emotional causes for white fragility against discursive and voluntary solutions - several other (potentially productive) difficulties arise. What voices and eventualities are relatively missing from the description of the workshops deserves consideration. As Waldman points out in her appreciative review, the role of people of color in the sessions described is pretty scant. They appear as rightfully suspicious and not active at times or as weighing in late in the proceedings or afterward with a critique that enables the facilitator to reflect and grow, modeling the overcoming of white fragility. But the substance of their contributions and the ways in which they might become more central to the discussions remain unclear. The very important and often transformative moments when people of color disagree with each other in discussions of race are perhaps subjects for another book. The labor historian in me also wonders how many antiracism workshops take place in workplaces, and whether we should not emphasize that those interactions are management-sponsored as well as workplace-centered. As much as Starbucks, for example, seems to enter the side of the angels by undertaking diversity training, they and other corporations also manage workers hierarchically, and use their antiracism training in marketing, in damage control, and in combating litigation. Such corporations are themselves in large measure responsible for the obscene racial wealth gap in the United States. Under their auspices may not be the most favorable setting for workers to find their ways beyond racism.

Full disclosure: I have had an inglorious and meager career - okay, the better noun is surely side hustle - in giving non-corporate antiracist workshops, in addition to being a historian of race and class. If asked to do so by unions or by friends wanting me to do something extra when in town to do an academic talk, I grudgingly assent. The critical legal theorist john powell and I long ago prepared a questionnaire on whiteness. I still sometimes trot out a few questions from it - "When are you white?" or "What would you put in a display on white culture?" - to try to break through to frank discussions very like those DiAngelo has honed strategies for encouraging.

Sometimes, such antiracism without a license has proven to be a wonderful learning experience, more for me than my interlocutors. The best examples came a quarter century ago. I was still trying to figure who the "white worker" was, past and present, and why so much of her or his political behavior accented the "white." So I just asked, particularly in workshops in Missouri sponsored by the New Directions Movement within the United Automobile Workers and the summer schools of the United Steelworkers: "Why would anyone want to claim the identity of 'white worker?'" The students were perhaps two-thirds white, and it was the white trade unionists who first answered. They said that if you were white you could get a job in higher-paying skilled trades, that you could get a better interest rate and buy a house in any neighborhood, that your kids could go to better schools, that cops were less likely to hassle you and your family. That is, they understood acutely - in that setting anyway - the advantages attending whiteness.

The remarkable matter-of-fact set of insights that those workers presented, reinforced by interspersed comments from African-American workers, suggests that White Fragility may - if taken as panacea rather than as a useful corner of a big problem - be too pessimistic as well as too cheery. Some of the critique of whiteness may already reside in the heads of ordinary whites, though sadly what they already know can increase defensiveness as easily as decrease it.

Long ago, in The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin invited a dis-identification from whiteness so that whites in the United States might join in the "suffering and dancing" around them. More than ever in our moment we need just that. In my view, such a change will come when whites are swept into social movements that express the interests of humanity and that probably will seldom have whites at their center. White Fragility - indeed any single book - cannot conjure up such movements. But it does much help us to get there.
David Roediger chairs the American Studies Department at University of Kansas. His recent Class, Race, and Marxism (Verso) has won the C. L. R. James Book Prize from the Working Class Studies Association.

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On the Defensive: Navigating White Advantage and White Fragility - Los Angeles Review of Books

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IN HER 1981 keynote address to the National Women's Studies Association, the poet and freedom fighter Audre Lorde described the perils of some such gatherings.

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1. Is My Progressive Neighborhood More Racist Than I Think?

2. Pride Should Always Look the Way It Does This Year

3. How Do You Write Jokes When Your Life Is Afflicted by Tragedy?

4. "You're Starting to Get Vacation Travelers Who Are Just Willing to Risk It"

Robin DiAngelo knows how to work a crowd. The author of White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism is confident without crowing, rehearsed yet sensitive to the audience at hand, funny and smirking and cajoling. " Seeing the Racial Waters," DiAngelo's touring half-day workshop, promises to "explore topics including white socialization, systemic racism, white solidarity, the specific ways racism manifests for white progressives, safety versus comfort, [and] the politics of emotions." She would, she warned us, "say the word white ... about 100 times" in a span of three and a half hours-a joke and a pledge. "You're all gonna be fine," she said. We laughed. The work had officially begun.

On a Tuesday in July, roughly 300 of us gathered at the Brava Theater Center in San Francisco's historic (and gentrifying) Mission District to unlearn our parts in the too-routine burlesque of anti-racism. The audience demographics were about as expected for an event on racial literacy: some black women besides myself, some other women of color, some men of color, a few white men, and a huge number of white women, in a range of ages and haircuts. The stage was mostly dark, illuminated by the calming blue palette of a projected photograph: schools of fish swimming in divergent directions among their own kind, just below the water's surface. As I craned my neck and waited for the show to begin, I was joined to my left by a woman named Mary, who would soon share with me the racial shame of her white burden.

DiAngelo, a professor at the University of Washington who specializes in whiteness studies and critical discourse analysis, first introduced the concept of white fragility to an academic audience in a 2011 article published in the International Journal of Critical Pedagogy. In her formulation, white fragility encompasses the range of physiological responses white people exhibit when so much as nudged to consider the racial implications of their existence-when forced to see themselves as white with the worldview to match, regardless of political affiliation. The slightest amount of "racial stress," as DiAngelo calls it in that article, can fracture composure, giving way to "emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation." In her book, she tells the deliciously haunting story of a white woman whose white co-workers feared she "might be having a heart attack" after hearing feedback about how her comments affected co-workers of color.

White fragility might have stayed in academia if Brendan Kiley, writing for the Seattle alt-weekly the Stranger, hadn't applied the term in a 2014 essay about yellowface casting in a local production of The Mikado, the satirical Gilbert and Sullivan opera set in Japan. The short article, which explicated the "deflection and denial"-filled defense of a white man who'd been cast in the show as an Asian character, propelled DiAngelo and her term into popular circulation. Virality led to a book contract, and White Fragility has yet to leave the New York Times bestseller list since its debut in June 2018, making it the fastest-selling book in the history of Beacon Press (our shared publisher). White Fragility has been hashtagged and 'grammed by book bloggers and celebrities and covered by outlets such as Elle, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, NPR's Morning Edition, the Call Your Girlfriend podcast, and this magazine.

Pulling out the paperback in public, I soon realized, was an invitation for comment. "Love that book," a white hairstylist told me, passing by as I sat under the dryer. The colorist, black, later asked me what I thought of it. As yet three-fourths finished, I still hesitated before answering that much of the material felt intuitive. I wasn't sure if it was a matter of me being jaded or black. It's worth checking out, I offered.

Nonreciprocal expertise about white behavior, white history, white ethnics, and white sociality has always been mandatory for nonwhites inAmerica.

White people tend to rebuke the idea that they share general traits, a reflex DiAngelo takes to task in her writing and workshops. Surely, though, some generalizations can be made about any cohort of white people willing to spend as much as $165 on a workshop about systemic racism. (DiAngelo's organizational partner, Education for Racial Equity, offers scholarships for black and indigenous participants of color and lower-income individuals. Seventy-five percent of the workshop's proceeds, we were told, would be donated to local nonprofits that support communities of color, such as Idle No More SF Bay.) They are likely affluent, degreed, and housing-secure even if debt reaches up past their ears. They know what to say and not to say in mixed company; they tsk at relatives who can't keep up with the times, but pass the salt when beckoned. Their social circle is racially homogenous, but if asked they would attribute this to chance over design. If they voted, they voted for Hillary, and they felt good about it.

"White progressives," as DiAngelo calls them in her book, are also the group most responsible for the social exhaustion that people of color experience on a daily basis. They are the hair touchers, the "you go, girlfriend!" cheerleaders, the " not even water?" inquirers, the "this is not my America" mourners. They are so finely parodied during two iconic garden party scenes-in The Boondocks and -that they might fail to recognize themselves. They might ask, with feigned naivete, what you thought of this whole Jussie Smollett situation. "White progressives are my specialty," DiAngelo told us during the workshop. She was smiling but not kidding.

When DiAngelo puts the spotlight on whiteness, she means it, and she starts with herself. "I am reinforcing whiteness and enforcing whiteness," she said onstage, articulating the hazard faced by any white person who gets applauded for anti-racist work. She knows that for all her expertise, this mostly white, mostly female audience will grant greater authority to any white person sharing their white truth. DiAngelo is a white woman who has spent decades deliberately mired in the race question. Much of her audience has not. How much can be learned in a single afternoon? I wondered. What good is a workshop?

Before Robin DiAngelo and "white fragility," there was Peggy McIntosh and "white privilege." McIntosh had her racial awakening in the late 1970s and early 1980s, working for the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women. At Wellesley, she conducted seminars on college curricula, instructing faculty on how to incorporate women into courses of study. In this role, she met resistance from men who considered the study of women merely supplemental, "soft stuff." When we spoke on the phone, McIntosh emphasized the tone of these responses, hostile niceties not precisely attributable to sexism. That tone inspired McIntosh to reevaluate her response to black women doing adjacent political work in Boston at the time, specifically the authors of the 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement, who condemned the racism left unchecked by the white women's movement. "At first I didn't see why they could say that," the 84-year-old McIntosh told me. "I thought we were nice, so nice."

In 1988, McIntosh published a plain-spoken paper narrating her awakening to the unearned advantages of white identity. A better-known abbreviated version of the paper, " White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack," provides a 50-point list of the "daily effects of white privilege." In that list, the I of McIntosh's personal experience bleeds into a repetitive I that functions as an address, conscripting readers to consider their own racialized existence. No. 5: "I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed." No. 15: "I do not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection." No. 20: "I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race." No. 41: "I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me."

In popularizing "white privilege," McIntosh, whose first book was published this summer, introduced audiences to the notion that white identity ought to be critiqued from the inside. Now, DiAngelo-who Michael Eric Dyson calls "the new racial sheriff in town" in the foreword to White Fragility -has taken up that mantle. "White fragility" is "the current moment's 'white privilege' by Peggy McIntosh," DiAngelo told me, with good humor. DiAngelo, like her predecessor, offers an accessible layman's route between common race sense and the contentious academic field of critical whiteness studies.

Whiteness studies is decades or centuries old, depending on who's asked. The notion of a white race is younger than ideology would have us believe-dating back just centuries-but is by no means new, and neither is its explication. In a speech delivered in Chicago in 1854, the same year as the publication of George Fitzhugh's Sociology for the South, Frederick Douglass connected the codification of whiteness to the threat posed by abolitionism, saying, "The word white is a modern term in the legislation of this country." W. E. B. Du Bois wrote disciplined observations of whiteness in his work, from the seminal sociology of 1899's The Philadelphia Negro to 1935's formidable Black Reconstruction in America, in which he puts forth the idea of a "public and psychological wage" awarded to white laborers, who "were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white." Discussions of white privilege, by that name, were in the air among civil rights era and post-'60s organizations, such as the aforementioned Combahee River Collective. As feminist scholar Sara Ahmed writes, "any critical genealogy of whiteness studies, for me, must begin with the direct political address of Black feminists such as [Audre] Lorde."

Among all this work lies the suggestion that nonreciprocal expertise about white behavior, white history, white ethnics, and white sociality has always been mandatory for nonwhites in America. As the Ex-Colored Man claims in the 1912 novel by James Weldon Johnson, "the colored people of this country know and understand the white people better than the white people know and understand them." Or, as Du Bois eerily conveys in his 1920 essay " The Souls of White Folk": "Of them I am singularly clairvoyant. I see in and through them. ... I see these souls undressed and from the back and side. I see the working of their entrails. I know their thoughts and they know that I know." More recently, sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom has shared the credo of " know our whites." As she writes in her 2019 essay collection , "If you truly know your whites disappointment rarely darkens your door."

The history goes long as history is wont to do, and yet there is a difference between the knowledge produced by nonwhite people experiencing whiteness and what has since formally taken the name critical whiteness studies. The precious scaffolding the academy provides for areas considered worth study-workshops, conferences, special journal issues, book contracts, syllabi, continued printing and reissues, and anthologies tied together by, most importantly, funding-matters. That shrinks the history of whiteness studies to the past 30-odd years, pinned (somewhat retroactively) to such early-'90s publications as David Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness, Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Alexander Saxton's The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, Ruth Frankenberg's White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness, Noel Ignatiev's Race Traitor journal, and Eric Lott's Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, among many other titles (some found in the bibliographies of both "White Fragility" the article and White Fragility the book).

In remarks opening a symposium on whiteness in 1995, Mike Hill, a professor of English, noted the "white renaissance manifest within critical race studies." Hill continued,

I guess one could say that this work, in all good intention, follows numerous appeals by black feminists to interrogate whiteness. ... But one could say, on the other hand, that whiteness comes almost too easily now ... the sheer ubiquity of white-on-white critique carries with it the potential for at least a little irony.

The speakers who followed chewed on the epistemological challenges of the burgeoning field, struggling to incorporate a newly self-conscious whiteness into older academic discourses on class, gender, and empire. Said one audience member: "Whiteness in my view can't ever be a basis from which to form radical notions of subjectivity, even when you pretend to talk critically about it."

While Margaret Talbot was overly flip in her 1997 assessment of the field for theNew York Times, reducing it to "a lot of silly posing," whiteness studies has, for good reason, been anxious about a " me-search" problem. Writing on "whiteness qua whiteness," to borrow from Richard Dyer's influential 1997 book White, can so often veer toward whiteness pro whiteness-whiteness in the interest of whiteness, whiteness for whiteness' sake, whiteness to hear itself talk. It's difficult to translate for a general audience all the discourse of a field that's been defined, at times, by its crises of faith. Confession is a much better sell.

Consider Tim Wise, whom Cornel West has dubbed "a vanilla brother in the tradition of John Brown," and who made his debut in the trades with 2008's White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son. Tonally, thematically, and through and through a memoir, White Like Me nonetheless yearns to transform testimony to pedagogy, recruiting the necessary pronouns- you, we, us-to assert a collective story. Wise's writing binds personality and anti-racist analysis so as to suggest one cannot exist without the other. DiAngelo admires Wise, who reviewed her book positively, but doesn't "see him as an educator," she told me, proposing instead that he's a "provocateur." DiAngelo says, "He's great at challenging and debating, but he's not necessarily gonna lay out, 'OK, let me explain to you how racism shapes you.' We have different roles."

"I was a classic whiteliberal." - Robin DiAngelo

While I would argue that Wise and DiAngelo both owe a debt to the market demand for white-on-white pontificating, I agree with DiAngelo: They are very different. Their work disagrees fundamentally, crucially, on the efficacy of confession. DiAngelo describes her book as "a kind of mainstream accessible whiteness studies," sidestepping the word popular despite the undisputable popularity of White Fragility. She does align her thinking with that of Ibram X. Kendi, who she says is also an educator. Kendi's How to Be an Antiracist, the follow-up to his National Book Award-winning history of racism in America, Stamped from the Beginning, takes "an instructive mood," as the New Yorker's Kelefa Sanneh writes in his review. When Sanneh compares Kendi's and DiAngelo's modes of anti-racist instruction, he finds DiAngelo's wanting-too uninterested in white personhood, too invested in what he considers spindly connections between social etiquette and institutional power. "Part of what makes DiAngelo's project surreal is the difference in scale between the historical injustices she invokes and the contemporary slights she addresses," Sanneh writes.

By contrast, I consider DiAngelo's inclusion of seemingly incongruous grievances a strength. Etiquette is never beside the point. As DiAngelo has said, neither White Fragility nor her workshops intend to convert the gleefully racist; she speaks to the well-intended whose banal blusters make racial stress routine. I am piqued, however, by Sanneh's skepticism regarding the place of people of color in DiAngelo's pedagogy as native specialists to whom white people should always defer. With whiteness on view, white people become the "flawed, complicated characters" of their own stories, he writes, while "people of color seem good, wise, and perhaps rather simple." At the least, to me, her categorization of all nonwhites as authority figures demonstrates DiAngelo's awareness, if not anxiety, that her material confirms much of what people of color have long known to be true.

But if, as DiAngelo takes for granted, people of color are by default experts on racial interactions, there is little room then for those who take that lived expertise further as scholars of race. I couldn't help but notice the relative dearth of contemporary black studies scholarship cited in White Fragility. Ta-Nehisi Coates, however, appears a few times: His study on reparations is quoted from in two separate chapters. This does not reflect negatively on Coates or the might of that essay, but given white liberals' propensity to deify Coates, the frequency of his invocation is worth noting in a book intended to critique white liberal sensibilities. And DiAngelo admits she is less inspired by Coates' intellect than awed by his poetics. "I just find him stunningly beautiful in his articulation," she told me over the phone.
But, she adds, "I don't know that it influenced my thinking."

And though scholars such as Frantz Fanon and Toni Morrison show up in White Fragility (the former relegated to a curious endnote), DiAngelo doesn't really consider black studies a disciplining force in the direction of her work. "The voice that's missing for most white people is looking at what it means to be white," she said. "I see whiteness studies as white scholars responding to [scholars of color] saying 'Stop looking at us, because, in fact, you are our problem.' " But I am hard-pressed to imagine an accurate account of our world that doesn't include the rigor of those who analyze blackness as dutifully as DiAngelo attends to whiteness. If DiAngelo willfully permits an absence here, it is one her core audience permits as well.

"I am an academic who came from practice to theory rather than theory to practice," DiAngelo told me. She started and finished college in her 30s, graduating with a bachelor's degree and unsure of what to do next. The career center steered her to diversity training, a job that made her privy to her own racial perspective for the first time. She was "challenged" first as a white person among colleagues of color, unfamiliar with how her whiteness affected others. "I was a classic white liberal," she admits without chagrin. She was challenged again going into workplaces, this time by white participants who resisted the challenge she and her colleagues posed to their racial worldview. In these sessions, "the hostility was off the charts," DiAngelo says. "The meanness, the resistance" of white participants was "just stunning."

After five years, DiAngelo went back to school to get the theory, entering the doctoral program in multicultural education at the University of Washington, where she completed a dissertation studying the racial discourse of white preschool teachers. Over the course of her academic career, she's continued leading anti-racism workshops for private companies and nonprofit organizations. Anecdotes from those workshops serve as interludes in White Fragility, among them an account of a white man, surrounded by 38 white employees in a room of 40, who "is pounding his fist on the table" because a "white person can't get a job anymore!" In another episode, a white educator puts on a "blaccent" to imitate a black parent; that woman quits the equity group after DiAngelo asks her to think better of such playacting.

White Fragility evinces an environment where discussions of whiteness frequently take place in public-on social media, in op-ed pages- as well as in pop culture. In movies and on television, teens such as Sabrina Spellman (of Netflix's Chilling Adventures of Sabrina), Gert Yorkes (of Hulu's Runaways), and the besties of Booksmart speak the language of social and cultural theory-part of, as Wesley Morris has interpreted, the greater inheritance of America's '90s-era culture wars. Indeed, a three-decades-old term like "white privilege" is now all but passé, run ragged by the likes of Macklemore and baked into the most casual critique of our present national hellscape. Even those disinclined to call whiteness a problem have altered their language, appropriating the progressive terms in vogue. Following the mass shooting motivated by anti-immigrant sentiment in El Paso, Texas, Donald Trump himself recited the recognizable vernacular, calling for the nation to "condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy."

Everyone has a bit of "Tumblr teen" in them, self-reflexively announcing their social positions as a buffer against the now-cartoonish refrain to "check your privilege." But while plenty of white people will flag their own whiteness, eagerly so in some cases, these admissions are curiously conditional. When the news broke that several high-profile parents were implicated in a conspiracy to illegally finesse their children into prestigious universities, publications (from Refinery29 to the Atlantic to Vox to, somewhat ironically, U.S. News and World Report) took care to name the collaboration of class and race that enabled such entitlement. On these particular bad actors, my Twitter feed was mostly on the same page. However, once people began reporting their own stories of educational fortitude, the material value of whiteness was suddenly less germane to the conversation. Unlike the children of celebrities, the people I followed implied, they had worked hard and earned it wholesale. It seemed the whiteness of celebrity children worked according to the rule, while everyone else's whiteness was the exception. The gap between knowing and naming, let alone reckoning, remains vast.

Asked about the state of whiteness studies under Trump, McIntosh and DiAngelo offer differing opinions. McIntosh, though praising the educational efforts of teachers and journalists, believes the country "is still pretty ignorant" of how race works at an individual and societal view. "Denial is very big," she says. From DiAngelo's perspective, however, the 2016 election incinerated the can-do optimism turned complacency entertained in the not-too-distant past, when our president was black. In the "current political climate," she told me, "the denial is pretty much over." The racists who embrace racism naturally remain-"I get stunningly ugly hate mail," including death threats, she says-but the abrupt end of the Obama era, she argues, "ripped off that thin veneer of post-racialness." In that sense, she adds, "my work is easier. ... A lot of well-intended white people are like, What is going on?"

I would say denial manifests quietly. Agreement and enthusiasm can stall conversation just as well as aggression, withdrawal, and tears. Like McIntosh, I observe little that suggests America has learned anything about race over the past 30 years besides how better to conceal its racism. Trump's election may have made some anti-racism work easier-getting butts in seats and books in hands-but it also gave well-meaning white people a monster next to which their casual racism now seems tame. It is enough to admit racism exists, that whiteness might be a problem. Any lower and the bar will be in Hades.

The stated goals of DiAngelo's public workshops are admittedly modest: on her part, "provide a comprehensive system analysis"; on ours, "identify personal complicity." At the Brava Theater in San Francisco, we were called on to do some structured sharing in small groups, trading off answers to questions like "How racially diverse was your neighborhood growing up?" and "How are you feeling right now?" We spoke in one-minute intervals and were encouraged to fill the allotted time or else let the seconds tick past awkwardly until the next person's turn. There were not rules, exactly, but guidelines. No crosstalk. White people, don't sit back and force the lone person of color in your group to venture forth first. Don't suck up all the air, either. If you do this for a living, let others try before you steamroll ahead. White people, "show yourselves." Behind each suggestion I could see the radioactive waste left from workshops past, or maybe the litter following most any conversation about race with a white progressive who's predisposed to make "anti-racist" an identitarian claim.

Mary, the older white woman seated directly to my left, broke one of the commandments on our first "turn and talk"-leaving me, an incoming professor of African-American literature, to define the words prejudice, discrimination, and systemic racism in relation to each other. Growing up in San Jose, Mary couldn't "remember race coming up" during her childhood, though she knew, distinctly, the one "Hispanic" family in her neighborhood. A social worker with a master's, Mary was there with her child Chase, who looked and spoke like a millennial. In contrast to their mother, Chase, who identified themselves as queer and trans, readily named their "white privilege," acquiescing to the "impactful" role race played in their life.

It is hard not to be enamored with the white person who refuses to call themselves anally.

I don't doubt the stakes felt higher performing these dialogues for me, yet even the "right answers" were boring. Mary was properly ashamed of her ignorance and remorseful for all that white people had wrought. Chase, hip to the rhetoric of our time, knew their queerness didn't exempt them from "systemic racism." They both meant well and said all the right things. They were, side-by-side, a beautiful cross-section of the evolution of racially progressive language. Different words, same opacity. Were they my students, I would have responded with a single-word question: Evidence? They had the what with a dash of why but none of the how. They knew of their whiteness, but could not name a single example of race happening in their lives. In a recent issue of the New York TimesMagazine, Claudia Rankine cataloged her own aborted attempts to talk to white men about white male privilege. No conversation seems quite so doomed as the one she wants to have with her own husband: "Certainly he knows the right terminology to use, even when these agreed-upon terms prevent us from stumbling into moments of real recognition. These phrases-white fragility, white defensiveness, white appropriation-have a habit of standing in for the complicated mess of a true conversation."

Would I have preferred to witness my seatmates stumble in pursuit of naming something specific? Probably not. Maybe my presence was an impediment-tripping up my partners whichever way they turned. But then that question returns: What good is a workshop? What good is a workshop without sounding foolish? What good is a workshop without any work? If my partners had instead been given another white person to lean on, would their answers have been more articulate? Would they have been more daring, less assured? Probably not.
In fact, given the way good white people like to perform their goodness for other white people-"making sure that others see us as having arrived," as DiAngelo writes-there is every possibility these answers would have been inflated, not humbled, without me there.

In a borderlands e-journal article published 15 years ago, Sara Ahmed asked, "Is a whiteness that is anxious about itself-its narcissism, its egoism, its privilege, its self-centeredness-better?" Explicitly concerned with a whiteness studies that says all the right things, Ahmed argues that "putting whiteness into speech ... however critically, is not an anti-racist action." Declaring that whiteness exists-for others or oneself-does not, itself, do anything. Saying "I have privilege" does not do anything besides make the speaker feel good, and feeling good is anathema to social change. DiAngelo would surely agree. For feeling good, in fact, nurtures the conditions for white fragility. "White equilibrium is a cocoon of racial comfort, centrality, superiority, entitlement, racial apathy, and obliviousness, all rooted in an identity of being good people free of racism," DiAngelo writes in her book. Nobody disturbs the status quo without testing their balance. At the workshop, complicity was identified, complicity was confessed, complicity went unelaborated. We paid for the honor of honesty with one another, and the air was free of static. If anyone felt pushed, they sure didn't seem moved.

Stage-side, the presentation is as good as critic-proof: DiAngelo preempted so many approaching concerns I eventually stopped anticipating the pitfalls. When she gave us her long but abbreviated list of "racial accountability practices," including "accountability partners" of color who are paid for their time and expertise, I could not help but think, dangerously, What a wonderful world it would be if she could be cloned. It is hard not to be enamored with the white person who refuses to call themselves an ally or who speculates, contrary to so many white women today, that if she'd been born a century earlier she probably would not have bucked her religious upbringing to become a suffragette.

For whiteness studies to push past the amiability of white-on-white education, Ahmed argues, all involved must perform something of an ethical piqué manège. The maneuver requires not one turn but several, the dancer traveling in a circle as her body rotates like a top and her head controls all. It is not difficult so much as prone to misdirection: Lose focus and the whole thing unravels in a mess of vertigo. To address whiteness properly, white people must "turn towards and away" from whiteness, "turning towards their role and responsibility in these histories of racism" as they "turn away from themselves, and towards others." Right now we are stuck in the first turn, moving ever so slowly, head craned in the mirror, enthralled by ourselves, enthralled by whiteness. But we must move on to the next turn, and the next, and the next. We must focus on where we need to go and learn to change our footing.

DiAngelo knows the choreography well and attends rehearsals without fail. She turns away and away and away again from the worst of what whiteness (studies) may bring. She faces her audience, aware that authority has its limits. "I cannot hold all your stories," she warns. "That's on you." That's exactly what I'm afraid of.

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"White Fragility" Has a Whiteness Problem

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Is My Progressive Neighborhood More Racist Than I Think? Pride Should Always Look the Way It Does This Year How Do You Write Jokes When Your Life Is Afflicted by Tragedy? "You're Starting to Get Vacation Travelers Who Are Just Willing to Risk It" Robin DiAngelo knows how to work a crowd.

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Dear White folks: Racism is not mine, it's yours. You're not 'helping' when it's your mess we're cleaning.

Photo: Westend61/Getty Images

I never use the term "White Ally" when I talk with family and friends. That's because I detest it. A little twang of dissonance echoes every time it comes my way. My animus is not directed toward the misnomer, but toward its attending mentality. Moreover, the sobriquet itself implicates one of the most insidious sleights-of-hand in mankind's history.

The logic behind the expression "White Ally" makes about as much sense as me going into your room, folding youraffirmations and putting them neatly away, cleaning all the introspection off of yourmirror, gathering yourfeelings for the laundry, and then you pick up your golliwog, put it away, and announce triumphantly, "We're in this together, and I am totally committed to helping."

Mmmm, not so much with that.

In my circles - Black or White, family or friend - I rarely discuss my rejection of the "White Ally" label's underpinnings. I am hugely ambivalent about doing so, and have been for years. Why hurt people you love who are fighting very hard to do a really important thing?

Well, because Black folks are dying as we sustain this illusion, dying for a factual impossibility. Let me repeat that: Insulating you from feeling horrible is killing us. Saying it's not personal sounds ridiculous, but, as it relates to you, it's not. As it relates to anyone who looks anything like me, it's the very essence of personal. And while I can live with your inner strife, I cannot live with black skin as probable cause. I cannot live with my son being hunted.

In a way that has never been more clear, the nation insists on paying for this lunacy of logic with the lives of Black women and men. There is nowhere left to even hide our babies. I will fight to the finish for my children. And I am not special - we all will fight for every brown baby. So listen carefully: We are done dying on our knees. If the "White Ally" pseudonym must fall, then fall it will. Let us say our farewells here with grace, then.

If the very idea of what's coming makes you feel attacked, I get that - that's fair. You're going to want to pace yourself, though. This is just the preamble. The water gets a bit choppier up ahead. I will say this, however: I am viciously allergic to centering a discussion about me around someone who is not me, so I will say this only once, and only here. I know amazing people across the entire spectrum of the human experience. People who are good, and who do good, in profound and genuine ways. There is no avoiding the discomfort around what we are going to contemplate. Know that I love you deeply. Know that I do not do this casually. And should it reach a point where it is too uncomfortable for you, know that I am doing this anyway.

This is not about nomenclature. This is not about contribution. This is not about your heart, or your hard work, or your good deeds. This is about - and only about - the damage behind defining as "help" a thing that is your duty. Because racism is not mine, it is yours. What you do is not called "help" when it is your mess we are cleaning.

Racism is not "ours." It is yours. And it is yours exclusively. Black folks did not build Black hate, and we certainly did not build it with you. Black folks are not The Bad Actor in Black hate. We can only work to convince The Bad Actor to stop acting badly. Black folks cannot kill Black hate in its cradle. Black hate breeds in places we cannot reach. If we could have killed it, we would have killed it. Trust that it is not our apathy about our own lives that keeps us dying in the streets.

Worse, racism disappears when we try to look it in the eye, lost in a sea of nonsensical protestations:

"I don't see color": Why are we talking about racism then?

"I'm not racist": Ooookayyyy, whatever it is you call this, you're still getting fired for it.

"I have Black friends": Me too. Go figure.

"Property destruction isn't the way": Just pretend it's Black, then it won't bother either of us.

"Stop spreading the hate": Stop giving it to me.

"Racism goes both ways": Yeah, I don't follow.

"All lives matter": Not so much. If all lives mattered, you wouldn't still be in that chair. "All" requires more engagement, not less, because stupid isn't really how math works here.

And while this back and forth can be quite entertaining, it's almost never productive.

Black folks cannot reach this race hate, cannot catch this race hate, cannot kill this race hate. But there you are, insisting that you do not see this race hate in your home, at your job, or among your family and friends, yet it must be hiding over there, somewhere. Think about it - race hate has not just survived, it has thrived. It had to thrive to endure for centuries and still feel shiny and brand-new. It is not invisible, not silent, not odorless, not stealthy. And it sure the hell is not hiding over here. The call really is coming from inside your house, behind a door to which Black folks have neverhad the key. Seriously.

This is not about blame. This is about ownership. A person holds one state of mind when she is at risk, and another when someone close to her is. Facing the former, she makes proactive choices to lessen herrisk. Facing the latter, she makes reactive choices to lessen the other person's harm. Her risk is anticipatory, and their harm has already come to pass.

There are two people in play here, but the actions belong to just one.

When risk and harm converge in the actor, the actor owns her kerfuffle. As the owner and the one now at risk, she ditches the "let me know if this is a problem" passenger seat, and takes the "this is what I'm not doing wrong today" wheel. She owns her duty and she owns her risk and, thus, she drives the cure like she's in an Indy. And that, not coincidentally, is the beginning of racism's end; self-preservation changes everything.

Racism is yours, and "we" are not in this together in the wayyou tell yourself "we" are. Let me rephrase that: I don't know who the "we" is in "we are in this together." I'm pretty stumped by the "in," the "this," and the "together" too, come to think of it. I know what we all pretend that means: We share a burden. But really, we don't. The most egregious parts of the burden are impossible to share, and impossible to shed.

Look at your horse. Her back is straight, her canter is frisky. She faces each glorious day like the gift it is. Now look at my horse. My nag, really. Her back is not just bent, it is just this side of broken. Her pace is slow, when she moves at all. Some days she trots. Most, though, she just starts and stops. Your filly, with her unencumbered back, is glorious. My faithful nag, bowed by centuries of baggage, is all but dead. And progress here is slow going because my nag is pulling the cart your mare is sitting in. That's not "we." That's "me."

The most egregious parts of the burden are impossible to share, and impossible to shed.

I can hear you now: What do you mean we have no horse in this race? Focus. There are tworaces at play here. Like the oncologist, you have no horse in your patient's race, but you're riding a thoroughbred in the race for the cure. I'm really going to need you to dig in here, folks.

Yes, you grieve. Yes, you rend and gnash. You shout down an aunt. Block a racist neighbor. Help your local Archie Bunker find his Jesus. But when you rest your head at night, you do so fairly confident the police won't kill you. And when it is too much for you, you turn off the TV or close your browser and give that pain some space.

I, too, shout down your aunt, Black Twitter your neighbor, and hide in the cut for Archie, who is - without a doubt - avoiding me. But when I rest my head at night, it is always with one eye open. And when it is too much for me, I must still don my armor, I must still sprint to the front line, I must still form an impenetrablewall of I WISH A MF WOULD to protect my children, my sisters, my men.

Now, you are free to exhale. Now, I can no longer breathe. In the end, you are still alive. In the end, there is no "we" in "me."

Photo: Adrian McDonald

Racism is yours, and the fact that Black folks are dying still does not make it "our" "thing."

One, it is not "ours."At the end of the day, Black folks are almost always the only ones dead.

Two, it is not our "thing." The fact that we do not want to die andyou should not kill us does not mean we co-own whatever it is that's going on here. Black folks' deaths do not vest us with shared ownership, much in the same way the survivor of an attempted murder does not share ownership of her would-be killer's crime. Of course it is in our interest to get in front of this. Let us deal with that. But the attempted murder? Your crime, your time, and we are not partners there.

Racism is yours, and you keep sticking me with the bill. You benefit from racism but I am burdened by it, like an expensive all-you-can-eat buffet where you gorge yourself while I have yet to eat. You can dive deep into the pasta, and pass on the carrots and peas. You can pick what you want, ignore what you don't, and leave when you're finished. Sometimes I can see the food that I'm not allowed to touch, but I am never permitted to leave the joint until I've paid both bills. I pay with my life, I pay with my limbs, I pay with what even the most random of persons can hunt me down for and take from me. I pay and pay and pay and pay and still there is no "we."

Racism is yours, and you keep sticking me with the bill.

Racism is yours, and saying you are colorblind is not helping anyone - it is not helping you; it is not helping me.First, you dosee color... yeah, you reallydo... yeaaaaah, you really, really do.

More to the point, "I don't see color" has always been such an odd olive branch of "relatability." Odd because it is untrue. Odd because of its dissonance - its actual meaning is the opposite of its intended meaning. Odd because those tropists seem to miss, in their private teachable moments, the huge reveal "colorblind" brings with it.

Oh, I understand its purpose. Believe me, we all do. We are just being nice when we let you explain it to us for the fifty-eleventh time this week. At the risk of landing on the wrong side of humble, I am not, shall we say, untutored. I do not strike even the most casual of observers as lacking emotional literacy. But even if I were both dumb and tone deaf, this isn't the utility of the Superconducting Super Collider we're contemplating here.

The speaker of the phrase "I don't see color" aimsfor "I respect you, I accept you as a person and I do so with no judgment." The speaker lands on"I do not consider your race so that I do not judge you." The speaker drives right past"Seeing your race triggers me to say I do not see your race, which I must erase so as not to judge you."

I know that you employ this phrase because you fear that we judge you and find you lacking. Okay, we judge you - good call. So, here's a pro tip: If you center around you a thing you are doing for me, you're doing it wrong. If this is just for me, you need only convey, in word or deed, "I respect you" and leave it there. You don't, of course. You keep speaking, yet you do so without knowing you are talking to yourself about yourself for yourself. You don't really need us for your pep talk, darlin. For this, there is definitely no "we." In fact, for this the "we" is all you and none of me.

Racism is yours, and leaving us to carry your water is not what good men do. I raise this last because it hits me hardest and leaves no room for banter: In no other venue of the modern American experience is the target charged to end the abuse. Corner any Black person and they'll rattle a racism rap sheet with disturbing ease. Yet our national plan for race relations conditions our survival on our ability to convince our rapists to rape us no more.

You look us in the eye with a clear conscience and an untroubled soul and say:

Let me tell you how to teach me not to rape you. No, not now, I will tell you when I am ready. Comfort me first so that I can hear your lesson, and the lesson ends when I feel like a bad person. And understand that if I don't get it, you'll just have to try harder until I do. And now lay back. Close your eyes. This won't hurt a bit. And if it does, never forget that it is your fault that I still do what I do.

I say this again: this is not what good people do. You are done breathing your cancer into my lungs. I will shepherd your humanity no more.

Racism is yours, not mine, and I return your chains to you here, my friend.

On the rare occasions when I discuss the fallacy of the "White Ally," the most common question I get is this: If not "White Ally" (always with the caps) what do we call White folks who go at racism with both barrels?

Me: ...Ummmm, people? ...G ood people?

It would seem that my sarcasm is less than illuminating. I have learned, instead, to answer that question with one of my own: What do we call cops who fight against police brutality with every fiber of their beings?

Right. I get the visceral dissonance on both sides of the equation - all dissonance matters. This whole thing demands not an enormous paradigm shift, but a complete paradigm schism for the only model of "race relations" (read: race abuse) we've ever known. This thing we have always done to frame an extraordinarily good thing in an extraordinarily bad way has been 400 years in the making. But I think the world is speaking to us right now, don't you? I also think it's time we listen. The death of our perilous self-deception is finally at hand.

Are we crowdsourcing accountability for Black hate, insisting you share in your brother's scorn? Do we suggest White folks are interchangeable, answerable for the crimes of any bad actor, and name you the ambassador for all?

Don't be ridiculous. That's not our team, that's yours. Stop projecting.

We are not stupid, or even spiteful. Nor do we act from that weirdly altruistic Stephen King thing (I love you Stephen!) of Black folk who use their mystical "shining" powers to help White folk. And, as my fire and brimstone shero said just days ago: be content, it is not revenge we seek. It is a simple matter of self-preservation: making you Bubba's crime-proxy leaves his threat free to roam the streets. Nothing about that is of any value to anyone here.

So no, you are not vicariously liable for the acts of strangers, your clan, or your kin. Deal with them as I assume we all do: shepherd from risk those who matter to you. Don't you worry, we'll handle Bubba. You just pay attention to your game here. You are singularly and directly liable for your acts, and given how it's not exactly uncommon for your folk to trip over a racist rock and fall into a racist puddle, that alone should scare you enough to keep you busy. Still unsure? Here are hundreds of examples of what I like to call " I Am Not Your Gramma's Negro " Seasons 1, 2, and 3. Have a look to bone up on things that are taboo.

Oprah's internet has volumes of "White Ally" guides: Becoming an Anti-Racist White Ally; The Challenges of Becoming a White Ally; Guidelines for Being A Strong White Ally; Becoming A Trustworthy White Ally; and, my all-time favorite, The White Ally Playbook.

Really, though? Really? Here is my book: Stop Being Racist; Get Your People, Too. That's it. That's the whole book. Available for two easy payments of 20 acres and half a mule.

A shift in liability brings with it a shift in consequences. I like my mother's approach here. Mom would always tell my brother and me - fine, whatever, just me - "I am not the boss of your choices, the boss there is you. I am the boss of consequences, though. And I will always come when you call for me."

And when the Boss of Consequences comes, things just might get ugly. He might strip you of everything you own. He might take your house, your car, your career, your integrity, your reputation, and your self-respect. He might take your inheritance and your future estate. He might drag you into court and drain your coffers. He might eviscerate any chance of a future by making your name synonymous with hate and inhumanity. You can keep your monogrammed towels, he will say, but that legacy is all mine.

Or, you could just not be racist. My husband is a Marine and this is what he loves to call a "self-correcting error." Harsh? You bet - intentionally so. What good is a consequence that is a gentle entreaty? Again, there is an excellent solution here: Racist you could just not be.

We will no longer curate your humanity for our protection.

If you're not being racist, no one is going to come looking for you. Blacks have neither the time for, nor the interest in, dragging people minding their business out of their own lane and into ours. Our plates are full with actual racists - nobody here is manufacturing anything special for you, okay?

We will no longer curate your humanity for our protection. It makes better sense to curate it for yours. Put in everyday terms, I do not teach my son to respect women to protect your daughter. I teach my son to respect women to protect my son.

Returning the consequence of race abuse to the lap of the race abuser is the beginning of the end. The motivation to learn about racism becomes profound. The personal investment to avoid racism reaps a richer bounty. The urgency to end racism comes into sharp relief. It's like that old negro spiritual: When your skin is in the game, the entire game changes.

That is why there cannot be a "White Ally." That is why we should - and must - abandon the fallacy. Find the lie. I'm waiting.

Patrick Hutchinson is a father and a grandfather demanding a better world for his clan and kin. That world starts with the most basic of rights: that is, the right to live. Friends warned Patrick that hate groups would interfere with a Black Lives Matter protest he was attending, but that was of no consequence to him. After all, what risk is agitation to a man who consumes a daily diet of death? Naturally, of course, a " racist thug " started a fire of race hate, provoking the very catching of hands he received. Patrick saw the hatemonger then, curled up and tight, lying on the stairs in a fetal position.

A group of men, including Patrick Hutchinson (carrying the man), help an injured man away after he was allegedly attacked by some of the crowd of protesters on the Southbank near Waterloo station on June 13, 2020 in London, United Kingdom. Photo: Luke Dray/Getty Images

Our Black father did not pause, and ran into the fire to save this purveyor of hate. Into the fire stoked by a hunger to destroy everything Patrick finds dear. And still he moved toward the danger.

Our Black grandfather scooped that man up, and marched for yet another fire still. And just like the white flames behind him, the blue flames before him could torch Patrick for the crime of black skin. And still he moved toward the danger.

Beaten from his aft, and with the police at his fore, Patrick never faltered, never strayed, never retreated. He abandoned his entreaty for his ownhumanity and stepped in to save all of yours. He never even paused at his own risk, despite knowing none of you would save him - the only one at risk from fires he had no hand in.While that may escape the notice of some, it is lost on no Black person in the universe. Not one.

If you understood nothing else about all I have written here, understand this: Patrick cannot offer his life as payment for the privilege of protecting you from yourselves. And, his life is not owed to the men who threaten the lives of his children, his clan, his kin. Black lives are your currency no longer.

It is okay, now, Black Warrior; you can put him down, good friend. You needn't move toward the fire. His burden is your burden never again.

Catherine Pugh is an Attorney at Law and former Adjunct Professor at the Temple University, Japan. She developed and taught Race and the Law for its undergraduate program, and Evidence, Criminal Law, and Criminal and Civil Procedure for its law program. She has worked for the Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Special Litigation Section, and as a Public Defender for the State of Maryland.
Editors: Sarah Clifton, Kay Lockridge, Laura Jackson (pro tip: never bet an editor she won't find any errors). Thanks for your vigilance, ladies. Special thanks to SC for ringing my bell on my unedited and post-publication insert sneak of "shit"... instead of, you know, "shift." You're the shift, little homie.

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There Is No Such Thing as a 'White Ally'

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I never use the term "White Ally" when I talk with family and friends. That's because I detest it. A little twang of dissonance echoes every time it comes my way. My animus is not directed toward the misnomer, but toward its attending mentality.

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Flowers and tributes surrounding street artist Akse's mural of George Floyd Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

The killing of George Floyd was the straw that broke the camel's back, with protests around the world capturing the anger at the death of yet another black person at the hands of the police, as well as the racial inequalities it exposed. After seeing the traumatic footage of Floyd's final moments, many people are asking what they can do to bring about change. With racism so deeply rooted in our social order, there can be no quick fixes - but here are 20 steps you can take.

When the civil rights leader Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) visited Birmingham in 1983, his message was clear: "If you are not in an organisation, then you are against your people." In other words, racism can only be addressed collectively; we can't afford to stand on the sidelines making excuses.
Black Britain matters

There are no quick fixes for the racism that is so ingrained in British society. But, from education and work to voting and organising, there are steps we can all take for a more equal world

1 Join one of the many organisations campaigning to change the system or to improve the conditions faced by minorities. There are always reasons to be sceptical: the people in them; the funding; the time commitment. But rather than criticise, if you agree with the organisation's goals, get involved and make it work. United Families & Friends, 4Front, Ubele and Organisation of Black Unity are some suggestions; there are many more.

2 If you are not able to join an organisation, create one. Start small, with a reading group, a community library or a campaign about a local issue.

3 Organise globally. This is not an American or British problem. The police killing of 14-year-old João Pedro Matos Pinto in Brazil is a reminder of the global stakes. If we want real change, we have to make international connections.

4 Design campaigns that disrupt. History teaches us that it is only when those in power have something to lose that change occurs. Strikes work because they cost your employer; boycotts because they deprive companies of revenue; and civil disobedience because it shuts down institutions. Urban rebellions were key in securing civil rights in the US in the 60s and the limited police reforms in the UK in the 80s. Clear demands coupled with disruptive campaigns converge the interests of those in power with the interests of the oppressed.

5 Support an organisation financially. Organising is not for everyone and certain struggles are black-led by design. But all groups need financial support. Remember that freedom is not free - if we want change, we have to put our money where our mouths are.
Make your vote count
Malcolm X warned that the "fox" who poses as your friend as he oppresses you is just as deadly as the "wolf" who is more open about his violent racism. Trump is wolf-in-chief in the White House, but watch out for those foxes.

6 Think about who you vote for. Maya Angelou said: "When someone shows you who they are, believe them." Look at the records of the party you want to vote for: how have they treated immigrants; what laws have they passed around equal rights and race relations?

7 Write to your MP. You can write to your elected representative even if you did not vote for them. You could start by supporting an independent inquiry into minority deaths from Covid-19 or an all-party inquiry into reparations. But feel free to write about any issue, whether action on police brutality, education equality or any other area of racial injustice.
Make work fairer
We have all seen businesses and institutions issue statements of horror at recent events. But expressing outrage is one thing; dealing with a lack of diversity or a bias in the workplace is quite another. Employment is key to a fairer world, because lack of access to jobs and career progression compounds economic inequalities.

8 Call out unjust hiring practices. If you work in, or use the services of, an organisation that seems only to hire white people, say something. Next time you are in a team meeting and it is entirely white, remember that this is a problem you can be part of solving. Promotions are also important. The NHS, for example, has a diverse workforce, but, as a report on its "snowy white peaks" noted, representation declines the higher up the organisation you go. Universities are so white that there are no black vice-chancellors in the UK and only 140 black professors out of 21,000.

9 Find out your workplace's policies for dealing with racial harassment. If you have no idea how to report racism in your workplace, you are not alone. People often feel intimidated about raising complaints and unsupported in doing so. You can challenge this by writing to companies and institutions to provide clarity or explain the lack of any such policies.

10 Drop the term BAME. There are a multitude of experiences of racism, making the catch-all term black, Asian and minority ethnic unhelpful when dealing with racism. Instead try to understand how racism towards different minority groups is expressed and the distinctive features of anti-black racism that are so central to understanding what is happening today. It is also true that anti-black racism is not perpetrated only by white people.
Improve education
A society can only be as equal as the knowledge on which it is built, so rethinking education is essential.

11 Read. There is a wealth of knowledge produced by those who experience and understand racism. It may not be on the curriculum, but the books are out there. An abundance of voices from black Britain can help us to understand this moment, including Afua Hirsch, Akala, Nels Abbey, Chelsea Kwakye and Ore Ogunbiyi. White Rage by Carol Anderson and Race for Profit by Keeanga-Yahmatta Taylor are hugely important to understanding the US. This is just the tip of the iceberg; dive into an alternative radical vision of history.

12 Think intersectionally. Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term as a way to truly understand how different parts of our identities can overlap and compound discrimination. For instance, the killing of George Floyd has sparked protests in a way that the death of Breonna Taylor in March did not. We have gendered how we understand police killings, which is why the campaign to highlight police brutality and anti-black violence against women, #SayHerName, was so important. One of the reasons we focus on violence against men is that it is so public. Taylor was killed in her home; the oppression of women often happens in private.

13 Write to your local school about its curriculum. If you are a parent, you have the responsibility and power to challenge your school on what it is teaching the children. Make sure black history goes beyond the token display in October. Support campaigns to transform the school curriculum, such as the Black Curriculum.

14 If you are a student, demand reforms at your university. Universities produce the knowledge dispensed in schools. It is student movements that have pushed the sector into trying to "decolonise" the curriculum. As a consumer, you can demand a different curriculum and new hiring practices. Also, consider a course that challenges the Eurocentric curriculum: for example, black studies at Birmingham City and black British history and black British writing at Goldsmiths, University of London.

15 Build alternatives. We do not have to accept the confines of the school system. In the UK, there is a 60-year history of black supplementary schools, where people volunteered to teach what the schools would not. This point goes hand in hand with organisation and ensuring that, if we believe something is important, we do it regardless.

No individual can solve the deeply embedded issue of racism. But personal change must be part of beginning to address it, particularly because the daily paper cuts of casual racism are so painful for those who experience them.

16 Listen. If you know black people, they will likely have told you lot of times about their experiences - but did you really listen? We are not playing the race card, nor do we have chips on our shoulders. It should not take a video of a man being killed and thousands of people in the street for you to pay attention.

17 Take responsibility for tackling racism where you see it. This could be in personal interactions, the workplace or on the bus. People tend to act in ways they can get away with. Calling out racist behaviour can make life more bearable for others.

18 It is better to stay out of it than to dip your toe in. Shallow, tokenistic commitment is worse than silence. If you are interested in racism only when it is trending, keep your solidarity to yourself.

19 Check your privilege. Recognising white privilege has become a major focus in building a fairer society, but we also need to recognise the privilege of living in the west. We can watch the killing of George Floyd only because of smartphones, which are so cheap only because they are made using resources stolen from Africa. Racism can be deadly in the west, but it is a daily matter of life and death in developing world, where a child dies every 10 seconds because of poverty. We cannot limit our imagination to solving the problems of inclusion into a system that oppresses worldwide.

20 Stay positive. We have been conditioned into believing that there is no alternative, that we have reached the end of history. That is white supremacist PR that cannot see beyond its own experience. It is time to radically rethink society to make it value black life. History tells us that the oppressed won't wait for ever. It is time to get on the bus or get out of the way.

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Want to make the UK less racist? 20 positive ways to bring about lasting change

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The killing of George Floyd was the straw that broke the camel's back, with protests around the world capturing the anger at the death of yet another black person at the hands of the police, as well as the racial inequalities it exposed.

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RACIAL CAPITALISM AND/AS STRUCTURAL RACISM

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Intro to racial capitalism for third-year sociology undergrads.

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White People Have a Very Very Serious Problem - Toni  Morrison on Charlie Rose

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Playing in the Dark: whiteness and the literary imagination

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Playing in the Dark: whiteness and the literary imagination

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How does literary utterance arrange itself when it tries to imagine an Africanist other?

What are the signs, the codes, the literary strategies designed to accommodate this encounter? What does the inclusion of Africans or African-Americans do to and for the work?

As a reader my assumption had always been that nothing "happens": Africans and their descendants were not, in any sense that matters, there; and when they were there, they were decorative - displays of the agile writer's technical expertise.

I assumed that since the author was not black, the appearance of African characters or narrative or idiom in a work could never be about anything other than the "normal", unracialized, illusory white world that provided the fictional backdrop. Certainly no American text of the sort I am discussing was ever written for black people - no more than Uncle Tom's Cabin was written for Uncle Tom to read or be persuaded by.

As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer. The fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive; an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly conscious.

It is an astonishing revelation of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity. It requires hard work not to see this.

It is as if I had been looking at a fishbowl - the glide and flick of the golden scales, the green tip, the bolt of white careening back from the gills; the castles at the bottom, surrounded by pebbles and tiny, intricate fronds of green; the barely disturbed water, the flecks of waste and food, the tranquil bubbles traveling to the surface - and suddenly I saw the bowl, the structure that transparently (and invisibly) permits the ordered life it contains to exist in the larger world.

In other words, I began to rely on my knowledge of how books got written, how language arrives; my sense of how and why writers abandon or take on certain aspects of their project.

I began to rely on my understanding of what the linguistic struggle requires of writers and what they make of the surprise that is the inevitable concomitant of the act of creation.

What became transparent were the self-evident ways that Americans choose to talk about themselves through and within a sometimes allegorical, sometimes metaphorical, but always choked representation of an Africanist presence.
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: whiteness and the literary imagination. Harvard University Press, 1992, pp.16-17

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Toni Morrison on Whiteness as a 'goldfish bowl'

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How does literary utterance arrange itself when it tries to imagine an Africanist other? What are the signs, the codes, the literary strategies designed to accommodate this encounter? What does the inclusion of Africans or African-Americans do to and for the work?

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Racism in Higher Education

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Institutional racism in the criminal justice 

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Institutional racism in the criminal justice 

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Christopher Alder who died in a Hull police station in 1988. Photograph: REX Shutterstock

In 1988, Christopher Alder, a former British army paratrooper, was injured during a fight and ended up in hospital. He was then arrested for a breach of the peace and taken to Queens Gardens police station in Hull. CCTV footage shows him lying face down on the floor of the station, motionless, with his trousers around his ankles. Officers stand around laughing while he lies there, dying, for 10 minutes.

Three years later, an inquest returned a verdict of unlawful killing - because the officers did nothing while, for three minutes of that time, Alder was unable to breathe. A year later, five police officers were prosecuted for manslaughter and misconduct in public office. All were acquitted on the direction of the judge. A review by the Independent Police Complaints Commission in 2006 concluded that four of the officers present were guilty of the "most serious neglect" and "unwitting racism". To add insult to injury, in 2011, Alder's family learned that they had buried a woman instead of Christopher.

This is a shocking case of a death in police custody - but of course it is not the only one. In the past weeks, as protesters have taken to the streets, some of the names of those who have died have been on demonstrators' lips and placards.Among them is Sean Rigg, who died at Brixton police station in 2008. An inquest found police had used "unsuitable force". One officer was prosecuted, for giving false evidence; he was found not guilty. No other officer was prosecuted.

In 2011, Kingsley Burrell died while detained by police at a mental health unit in Birmingham. An inquest found that prolonged restraint had been a significant factor. Again, three officers prosecuted for lying under oath were found not guilty. In 2017, Darren Cumberbatch was punched repeatedly, beaten with a baton and Tasered by police. An inquest found police force was "excessive" and "probably avoidable". His family are still waiting to hear if anybody will be prosecuted. Just over two weeks ago, Simeon Francis was found dead in a cell in Devon. We know little about the circumstances, and I fear that his family won't be getting answers any time soon.

There have been no successful prosecutions for deaths in custody since 1969 - not one police officer has been convicted for their role in the death of someone in their care. That is not to say there haven't been prosecutions - but the evidence has never been sufficient to persuade a jury that a police officer should be responsible.

Why is this? Well, invariably, in such cases the only witnesses are other police officers; there may also be CCTV and some medical or forensic evidence. In the civilian world, friends will give evidence against friends in the most serious of crimes, but after three decades working in criminal law, I cannot recall a death-in-custody case where a police officer has given evidence against another police officer. Juries are loth to convict police officers generally, but the tendency is especially stark in these cases. No successful prosecutions in 50 years tells its own story.

Of course, deaths in custody are only a small percentage of deaths following police contact, which include apparent suicides and police shootings, among other categories. Well-known examples include Rashan Charles, who died after being chased and restrained; Edson Da Costa, who died of cardiorespiratory arrest after being stopped by police; and Mark Duggan, whose shooting sparked riots in 2011. Nor will I soon forget how Zahid Mubarek was murdered by his racist cellmate Robert Stewart at Feltham Young Offenders Institution. They were housed together despite the fact that Stewart's hostility to BAME people was widely known.

It is true that many other people die in police custody, but black people account for 8% of these deaths, while accounting for only 3% of the population. They are dying disproportionately and the perception remains that race leads to a different outcome, which is often premature death.

Partly this is because this is merely the end point of a system that disproportionately suspects, arrests, charges, remands, convicts and imprisons people from black, Asian and other ethnic minority communities. A David Cameron-commissioned report by David Lammy found in 2017 that the colour of your skin has a measurable impact on how you are treated at every stage in the justice system.
Black Britain matters
So, for instance, at a time when the stated determination of the government has been to divert young offenders from the formal criminal justice approach, the proportion of young BAME prisoners has gone up, from 25% in 2006 to 41%. The numbers offending and reoffending also rose. Historically, stop-and-search powers have disproportionately targeted BAME people. In 2015, in response to widespread alarm, the Home Office and police tightened training and guidance of police officers, which instantly reduced the numbers being arrested. However, following a spate of knife crime, the rules were again changed and the numbers have moved back up to historic highs.

Between April 2018 and March 2019, there were four stop and searches for every 1,000 white people, and 38 for every for 1,000 black people. Lammy's analysis of sentencing data showed BAME defendants were more likely to receive prison sentences for drug offences, even when previous convictions were taken into account. This was reinforced by research commissioned by the Sentencing Council published in January, which showed that if you are from a minority you are 1.5 times more likely to go to prison for drugs offences than if you are white.

Lammy's report proved in effect that if you placed a white man and a BAME man in the same predicament with the same previous history, with the same or similar evidence, the BAME man was more likely to be stopped, arrested, charged, denied bail, convicted and sentenced to prison. Then, while in prison, he was less likely to be supported to rehabilitate, more likely to reoffend and more likely to die in custody - and his family were less likely to get justice following that death.

Lammy recommended urgent reform. However, three years later, there is not one BAME chief constable - in fact there has only ever been one. Until very recently, there were no BAME commissioners dealing with miscarriages of justice and not one member of the 240-strong parole board was BAME. There has never been a BAME director of public prosecutions and the number of BAME judges and magistrates, while it is increasing from a very low base, is still well below the proportion that will reflect the communities they serve. When I was chief crown prosecutor and then chief executive of the country's police and crime commissioners, I would often sit in meetings of criminal justice leaders and be the only non-white person in the room apart from the person taking the minutes.

I was born in Britain, to a family that has worked with the British army for half a century, one of whom was murdered by the IRA for doing so. I have spent much of my professional career tackling crimes and misbehaviours in all communities regardless of race or religion, yet I too have been subject to racism in the course of my work.

One of the last things I did as a prosecutor was to ensure that the district judge Richard Hollingworth could no longer preside over criminal cases. This came about because of his response when one of my team was trying to fix a trial date to accommodate the victim, Miss Patel. "It won't be a problem," said Hollingworth. "She won't be working anywhere important where she can't get the time off. She'll only be working in a shop or off-licence." Where she was working was irrelevant. As it happens, she was a law graduate, but his prejudice was there for all to see.

When I was less senior, I recall asking another judge to bail the defendant because he had no previous convictions. I was wrong, the judge said. I replied that there was nothing on the police national computer. But he was adamant. It was a busy "first appearance" list so I hadn't seen the defendant come up from the cells behind me. I looked and saw he was a young black man. I knew what the judge was saying and I gave him a stare that told him I knew and he should back off. He did.

I recall prosecuting a case where I, the defence counsel, the judge, the usher, the court legal adviser, the defence solicitor, the court stenographer and the security were all BAME and the defendant was white. How we all laughed! How we all thought this would never happen again. How right we were.

The same systemic racism applies to victims from BAME communities. There is not enough research, but we do know that if you are a white victim of domestic abuse you will suffer, on average, 35 incidents before action is taken by an authority. The equivalent number of incidents for BAME victims is 100. The latter have less confidence in reporting, higher familial and community obstacles to overcome, and fewer properly funded support groups to advise them. And when it's more difficult for people to ask for help, it's easier for the system to ignore them.

All of this means I am not surprised to see people marching in the streets during lockdown. The trust deficit between those in power and those they lead is greater than at any time in living history. The lies we are told have been amplified and adopted as a strategy by people who should know better.

Black people account for 3% of the population, but 8% of deaths in custody. As a former chief prosecutor, I know this is only the end point of a system that disproportionately suspects, arrests, convicts and imprisons BAME people

Zahid Mubarek, who was victim of a brutal racially aggrevated murder in March 2000 while detained at Feltham Young Offenders Institution for shoplifting.

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There have been no successful prosecutions for deaths in British police custody since 1969 - here's why

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In 1988, Christopher Alder, a former British army paratrooper, was injured during a fight and ended up in hospital. He was then arrested for a breach of the peace and taken to Queens Gardens police station in Hull. CCTV footage shows him lying face down on the floor of the station, motionless, with his trousers around his ankles.

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Continued exposure to racism and its effects creates trauma. More white people who think they are allies need to understand this.

A repeated, insidious, ongoing series of events. Your Black friends will not tell you this.

If "racism" as word makes you uncomfortable you should probably unfollow me but instead I'll say repeated and systematic and systemic dehumanisation or othering of a group of people based on the colour of their skin. It can show up at any time, any place, unannounced.

The dehumanisation can be benign or unintended but it's still dehumanising and othering.

For a Black person in a predominantly white country the effects of racism are probably best compared to a form of PTSD. Which is why the Angry Black Person narrative is so reductive. Anger is some people's response to trauma. Maybe they want to cry but vulnerability requires trust.

And how are you going to trust if you don't feel safe? Or if the things you know are very real aren't even acknowledged as happening? The closest parallel here may be domestic violence or domestic abuse.

I know some people will get upset that I didn't put a content note for that last [bit]. It's deliberate. Black people aren't warned when racism confronts us at work, on the way home from friends' houses or (for people with non-Black relatives) in our own families.

What can we do?

So yeah, you like our food and music and maybe sometimes you love us but also start to notice what the world is like for Black people. The stuff you can dip out us as and when. Notice and acknowledge it. Don't leave it to us to do all the time. It's exhausting.

But don't go too far. I don't need to be tagged into police brutality or given endless statistics about how I'm less likely to be in leadership positions or have a job. I KNOW. Share that with your fellow white friends because they seem to think we are making it up and just need to smile and be polite.

The hardest working, most polite, even tempered, smartest dressed Black person in the world is still Black. There are plenty of people who will make judgements about them before they've even opened their mouth or pulled out their degree certificate.

"What can we do?" I've heard this so many times. I don't know- not leave it to the only Black person in the room or organisation to bring up race and inequality at work?

Go and make your own BAME contacts instead of repeatedly expecting us to be the Black person whisperer? Yes I probably know more Black (and brown) people than you but we don't all know each other.

Understand that Black friends, colleagues and lovers may actually be pretty badly affected by repeatedly seeing humanisation or people who look like them on the news (and elsewhere).

Don't expect people to always be polite in the face of what is actually repeated trauma over time.

For people with Black partners and children

Non- Black partners of Black people (including non-Black people of colour). You need to make sure that your Black partners can talk to you about racism and anti- Blackness and feel listened to. You will not know how it feels to be Black. Ever. You can listen to somebody who does.

And...when they challenge you on stuff you may have done or your family or friends... listen to them and support them. I have seen marriages end because of ongoing failure to do this.

For non-Black parents of mixed Black kids... you need to educate yourself independently of your partner. "I don't notice it" or "I can't ever understand" will not fly. Your kids will be read and treated a Black all around the world so up your game and protect them.

For Black people with non-black partners

Black people, if you have a non-Black partner who you can't have difficult conversations about race with 1) you need a new partner 2) please don't have children with them.

My (white) partner tells me that I told her she needed to read "Why I'm no Longer Talking to White people about race" if we were going to be a proper thing. I don't remember that but to be honest, if somebody can't but in 8hrs to read a bit about how race affects you then is a good sign?

Black people and other POC have different experiences

Note I'm saying non-Black people. Again deliberate. There are many commonalities between the experience of all POC (people of colour) in predominantly white countries BUT anti-Blackness pervades all non -Black communities world wide. Any honest non-Black POC knows [and acknowledges] this.

So when a Black person says something about their experience that is specifically to do with anit-Blackness please suck ya mum * if you decide to use non-black POC as a counterpoint.

This happens A LOT.

Black is wonderful

On the angry black person point. Maybe it's anger (which is entirely valid in the face of repeated dehumanisation) maybe it's a safer way of expressing despair, fear, sadness, shame, disappointment or overwhelm.

Black people reading this. Express you anger (or sorrow) to people who understand and love you. But also, don't let other people define you Blackness. Go watch birds, enjoy nature, [go where you want, wear what you want, listen to the music you want], laugh, seek love. All these things are resistance too. Blackness isn't struggle. Blackness is amazing. A racist and anti-Black world makes life a struggle.

Blackness isn't struggle. Blackness is amazing. A racist and anti-Black world makes life a struggle. Click To Tweet

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This blog post was originally a series of tweets from me (@ieshasmall) inspired by a number of things personally and in the news this week including the repeated sharing on social media of the police murder of George Floyd and false accusations of Amy Cooper which could easily have led to the same result.

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*if you read the post and thought "it would have been really good if only she hadn't been so vulgar in that one sentence" you are part of the problem. Respectability politics is a scourge.
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If you are interested in the human side of leadership then my book The Unexpected Leader is for you.

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Continued exposure to racism and its effects creates trauma. More white people who think they are allies need to understand this.

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On the 4th of October 2018, I gave a Black History Month talk, in which I argued that the 'celebration' of Black History Month should be more than an act of remembrance of voices at the margins but must have bringing about radical transformations as an ultimate aim. Especially in the context of such celebration by a university and within a university. And especially in the International Decade of People of African Descent.

Black History Month has become a shrine of not-forgetting, a horological monument and testament to the vast and varied multitude who preceded us all across this terrestrial space. It is a month-long resurrection of memories of the departed, of those who wore our skin and went ahead of us to draw back the night under which we had been flung, and ensure that we have the measure of freedoms that we have today. But it also gives us an overt opportunity to look to the future to chart a way forward for a people with full knowledge of where our people have been, the dreams they have dreamed, the hopes, the victories, the tragedies and triumphs of the past.

To do the above, I suggest that we make use of certain tools - Decolonisation and Afrofuturism, whilst standing guard against their co-optation. We can only take up these tools if we make ourselves intellectually sound in their literary currency; use that intellectual range to disseminate and contextualise Pan-African ideas leaving no voices at the margins; ensuring that critical work of our voices are acknowledged and given life and permanence through citation. As Sara Ahmed says, citation is a way of 'reproducing the world around certain bodies'. Put differently, because knowledge was the first frontier of our unfreedom, it must be the first frontier of our freedom. We must intellectually speak the world we want to see into being. As we all agreed on the day, we must: READ, WRITE, CITE.

To whit, a reading list: (to which I will continue to add to and please send your suggestions. Thank you!)

Achille, Mbembe. "On the postcolony." Berkeley, University of California (2001).

Adebisi Foluke. " The Meaning of 'Together'". Foluke's African Skies. 2018.

Adebisi, Foluke. " The Middle Passage: Or What We Lost To The Waters". Foluke's African Skies, 2018.

Adejumobi, Saheed A. "The Pan-African Congress," in Organizing Black America: An Encyclopedia of African American Associations, Nina Mjagkij, ed. (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2001).

Adi, Hakim, and Marika Sherwood. Pan-African history: Political figures from Africa and the Diaspora since 1787. Routledge, 2003.

Africa Gender Institute, Feminist Africa 19 Pan-Africanism and Feminism Issue 19: September 2014

Akala, Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire, (2018), Hachette

Andrews, Kehinde. "Beyond Pan-Africanism: Garveyism, Malcolm X and the end of the colonial nation state." Third World Quarterly 38, no. 11 (2017): 2501-2516.

Asante, Molefi Kete. Afrocentricity. 2nd ed. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1988.

Baldwin, James. Collected essays. Vol. 2. Library of America, 1998.

Biney, Ama. The political and social thought of Kwame Nkrumah. Springer, 2011.

Biko, Steve. "Black consciousness and the quest for true humanity." (1973): 87-98.

Biko, Steve. "The definition of black consciousness." The African Philosophy Reader 360 (1998).

Biko, Steve. I write what I like: Selected writings. University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Black Panther [2018] dir Ryan Coogler

Blain, Keisha N. Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.

Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on colonialism. NYU Press, 2001.

Davies, Carole Boyce. "Pan‐Africanism, transnational black feminism and the limits of culturalist analyses in African gender discourses." Feminist Africa 19 (2014): 78-93.

Dei, Sefa George. "Afrocentricity: A cornerstone of pedagogy." Anthropology & Education Quarterly 25, no. 1 (1994): 3-28.

Dei, George Sefa. "Indigenous anti-colonial knowledge as 'heritage knowledge'for promoting Black/African education in diasporic contexts." Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012).

Dei, G.J.S., 2017. Reframing Blackness and Black solidarities through anti-colonial and decolonial prisms (Vol. 4). New York, NY: Springer.

Dei, George J. Sefa. Teaching Africa: Towards a transgressive pedagogy. Vol. 9. Springer Science & Business Media, 2009.

Diop, Cheikh Anta. "Precolonial Black Africa: A comparative study of the political and social systems of Europe and Black Africa, from antiquity to the formations of modern states." Westport, Conn: L. Hill (1987).

Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. Souls of black folk. Routledge, 2015.

Eddo-Lodge, Reni. Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People about Race. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018.

Fanon, Frantz. The wretched of the earth. Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 2007.

Fanon, Frantz. Black skin, white masks. Grove press, 2008.

Garvey, Marcus. The philosophy and opinions of Marcus Garvey, or, Africa for the Africans. Vol. 1. The Majority Press, 1986.

Hirsch, Afua. Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging. Vintage, 2018.

Lorde, Audre. Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Crossing Press, 2012.

Mazama, Ama. "The Afrocentric paradigm: Contours and definitions." Journal of Black Studies 31, no. 4 (2001): 387-405.

Mudimbe, V Y. The invention of Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

Mudimbe, Valentin Yves. The idea of Africa. Indiana University Press, 1994.

Nangwaya, Ajamu, ' Pan-Africanism, Feminism and Finding the Missing Women '

Nkrumah, Kwame, Roberta Arrigoni, and Giorgio Napolitano. Africa must unite. London: Heinemann, 1963.

Nyerere, Julius K. "A United States of Africa." The Journal of Modern African Studies 1, no. 1 (1963): 1-6.

Olusoga, David. Black and British: A forgotten history. Macmillan, 2016.

Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́. The invention of women: Making an African sense of western gender discourses. U of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Vol. 239. London, 1972.

Sankara, Thomas. "Women's liberation and the African freedom struggle." (1990).

Sankara, Thomas. Thomas Sankara Speaks: The Burkina Faso Revolution, 1983-87. Pathfinder Pr, 1988.

Senghor, Léopold Sédar. "Negritude and African socialism." The African Philosophy Reader (1998): 438-448.

Sherwood, Marika. "Pan-African Conferences, 1900-1953: What did 'Pan-Africanism' Mean?." The Journal of Pan African Studies 4, no. 10 (2012): 106-126.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the subaltern speak?." Can the subaltern speak? Reflections on the history of an idea(1988): 21-78.
The 1st Pan African Conference
The 13 th: Director - Ava DuVernay

The Durban Declaration and Programme of Action
The Pan-African Congresses, 1900-1945
Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. "Decolonization is not a metaphor." Decolonization: Indigeneity, education & society 1, no. 1 (2012).

Ture, Kwame, and Ekwueme Michael Thelwell. "Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan-Africanism." (2007).

X. Malcolm, with Alex Haley. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965).

Yaszek, Lisa. "Afrofuturism, science fiction, and the history of the future." Socialism and Democracy 20, no. 3 (2006): 41-60.

We must read as if our lives depend on it. Because they literally do. But the beauty of our lives are also found in our togetherness. The meaning of freedom is found in together. In searching for our own pan-Africanism, we should know what has been done, and where our people have been, what they believed, what they thought and theorised... so that we can go forward together.
Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu
We are who we are because we are we.

How long?

How long before we realise that Sade, Aretha, Makeba and Nina sing the same songs of survival?

How long before we begin to question why the strains of a Sophiatown symphony turn up in the melody of Motown music?

Why the rhythm of a Benoinise Balafon can be heard in Belafonte's version of La Bamba? How long before we understand that Tubman and Tambo, Stokely and Senghor were fighting for one liberation?

That King and Sankara, Malcolm and Lumumba were killed for the same vision of freedom?

How long will we keep seeing Africa as a place of darkness rather than the origin of light?

How long before we realise that our freedom lies together?

'Together' is the rhythm of all African music,

'Together' is the hidden meaning in every African's name,

Africa and her diaspora,

The other and her other,

Together

'Together' is the cadence of every African language.

'Together' is the completeness of every African soul...
Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu
We are who we are... together.

African woman, lawyer, teacher, poet and researcher. Singer of songs, writer of words, very occasional dancer of dances. I seek new ways of interpreting the African experience within our consciousness to challenge static ideology.

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Pan-Africanism, Afrofuturism and Decolonisation: A reading list

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On the 4th of October 2018, I gave a Black History Month talk, in which I argued that the 'celebration' of Black History Month should be more than an act of remembrance of voices at the margins but must have bringing about radical transformations as an ultimate aim.

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Ash Sarkar Meets Akala | Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

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Get the latest on coronavirus. Sign up to the Daily Brief for news, explainers, how-tos, opinion and more.
Niellah Arboine is tired of being constantly reminded her life is at threat.

"It's coming from so many directions right now. Knowing Covid-19 is more likely to kill Black people than anyone else, and now we have protests where we -Black people - are fighting for our lives, it can all feel very overwhelming and scary."

Like Niellah, I am someone who is very easily overwhelmed by the news. As social injustices unfold across the world, I have always grappled with the urge to close the tab - to distract myself - followed by the realisation that there is more injustice in the world than on the news. Being a Black woman, and a journalist, this process is very hard.

Niellah - who is 26, and a journalist too - feels that, when you are a Black writer, it can be difficult to find any peace or solace.

Get top stories and blog posts emailed to me each day. Newsletters may offer personalized content or advertisements. Privacy Policy

"I'm writing about this all day every day. There's so little respite from it. I don't get to just switch off - it's my job to engage."

The past few months have been hard for us. A global pandemic stopped everything - borders closed, businesses shut their doors and friends and families ceased to meet.

The premature Black death that is embedded in the structures of the state reared its head again - in the UK we learnt that being Black is a health risk, making us four times more likely to die of coronavirus than our white counterparts.

Then a Black man, George Floyd, was murdered by a white police officer in broad daylight, and a wave of ongoing protest and unrest swept the world faster than the virus did. Images and ideas of Black death were everywhere.

This double assault has taken somewhat of an emotional toll for Black people.

As a result of lockdown, many of us are consuming far more news than ever before. Social media has become a hotspot for sharing both protest footage and messages of solidarity; our Twitter communities bore witness to the realities of police brutality, and Instagram turned Black for a day .

Paulina, a 25-year-old biologist who has asked us not to use her surname, tells me that she feels worn down from suddenly following the news so intently.

"I have probably cried more this year than last year already - from anxiety and stress rather than feeling down," she said. "I don't feel like I can or should just disconnect, and I'm thinking about race constantly."

This is the longest I've been physically separated from the majority of the Black people in my life. I feel extra isolated in a time when I could really do with that community and upliftingNiellah Arboine

Yassmin, a 29-year-old writer and broadcaster, emphasises how moments like this can feel for Black people: just one thing after another.

"I feel like I've been punched when I was already out for the count," she said. "It's not as if we arrived at this point with our tanks full. [Black people] were already depleted, grieving our friends and family, supporting our community through a once in a lifetime catastrophe made worse by our leadership [...] and all without our usual coping mechanisms available."

This feels particularly pertinent - for many of us, particularly Black women and non-binary people, the creation of support networks offers us vital protection against a racist society.

Now, during lockdown, we can't access them.

Niellah is feeling the effects of this. "This is the longest I've been physically separated from the majority of the Black people in my life," she said. "I haven't seen my family since February. I feel extra isolated in a time when I could really do with that community and uplifting."

Some feel is exactly this combined frustration that has led to such widespread and ongoing protest.

Josephine Williams, an American living in the UK and studying to be a lawyer, thinks it is no coincidence that a pandemic served as the backdrop for the biggest wave of US protest since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

"As Black people, watching [the murder of] someone who looks like us - who could be us - creates helplessness.

"Coronavirus compounds that helplessness we feel watching these videos. Suddenly, we're sitting at home - Black people have more than 50% unemployment in the United States, no one's been given a furlough, we were given a $1,200 cheque to survive a pandemic that could last between three months and two years.

"And on top of all of that, we get to watch videos of people with whom we identify getting murdered, arbitrarily."

Josephine also points out that Black people are disproportionately likely to be key workers - particularly in the US, where 37.7% of Black people work in essential industries.

And, as we have seen time and time again throughout history, marginalised people whose lives are laid on the line for their countries have not been adequately recognised or compensated.

And on top of all of that, we get to watch videos of people with whom we identify getting murdered, arbitrarilyJosephine Williams

"My father, who is an essential worker for the city of Portland, Oregon, has been going out and risking his life. Meanwhile a lot of white people were going out and protesting the stay at home orders, and demanding their right to get a haircut - which puts my father's life at risk.

"All of that has led to this unrest. It was a recipe for disaster from start to finish."

It seems that both the pandemic and the death of George Floyd have served as a breaking point for so many Black people, in the US and on an international scale. As a result, it makes sense that we are seeing both a wave of action and a wave of exhaustion - as the rallying cry goes, Black people are sick and tired of being sick and tired.

There are still difficult questions on the road ahead for Black people - like what we do now.

Niellah tells me: "I really want to go to one of the Black Lives Matter protests but like many Black people I'm torn. I'm scared for my health and for my community's health. I know there's many other ways to protest, support and aid, but it's like being stuck between a rock and a hard place right now."

But the burden of all this mental mathematics isn't just for Black people to carry. White allies need to take some of the responsibility - and now is the time to support the movement.

I really want to go to one of the Black Lives Matter protests but like many Black people I'm torn. I'm scared for my health and for my community's health.Niellah Arboine

Josephine feels that, in some ways, this moment is unique, with an unprecedented amount of momentum having built in a week alone. "Unlike [the protests of] the 1960s, we've seen a cross-racial alliance of people taking to the streets, instead of just Black people."

This has opened some white people's eyes to police brutality in a way they hadn't quite understood before: "We're seeing white journalists beaten and attacked for the first time."

Yassmin agrees that non-Black people may be finally waking up to the realities of both white supremacy and police brutality: "I'm not optimistic - I live life as a cynical realist.

"But what I do see is more engagement than I've seen for a while - maybe also because people are in lockdown, and have time, or because they have a sense of what it means to be at the mercy of the system for the first time - either way there are certainly ingredients for something potent to happen."

With the ingredients laid out for them, white people must now step up their allyship - and Josephine explains why posting a black square and saying "solidarity" isn't enough.

"I've seen a lot of non-Black people reaching out to me and others, I've also seen a lot of white people posting on Twitter saying 'I stand with you' type thing.

"I welcome that, but on the flipside I think the most important thing for white people specifically to comprehend here is that racism and race is not just a Black burden - it's actually a white burden.

"Racism is something they need to engage with because it's something they cause. It's something they actively participate in. It's something they benefit from every day."

This means political, social and economic allyship: donating to bail funds , going out to protest as safely as possible, and actively practising anti-racism long after the hashtags have petered out.

"The notion that white people need to address racism for 10 days when they're at a protest is a fallacy. White people need to address racism every day."

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'Fighting For Our Lives' - How It Feels To Be Black In 2020

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Get the latest on coronavirus. Sign up to the Daily Brief for news, explainers, how-tos, opinion and more. Niellah Arboine is tired of being constantly reminded her life is at threat. "It's coming from so many directions right now.

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A collection of research, sources and resources for educators to support social justice and anti-racism.

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10 Documentaries To Watch About Race Instead Of Asking A Person Of Colour To Explain Things For You

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10 Documentaries To Watch About Race Instead Of Asking A Person Of Colour To Explain Things For You

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10 Documentaries To Watch About Race Instead Of Asking A Person Of Colour To Explain Things For You

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It's important now more than ever that Australians engage in important conversations about race.

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What is white privilege?

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Yesterday I was tagged in a post by an old high school friend asking me and a few others a very public, direct question about white privilege and racism. I feel compelled not only to publish his query, but also my response to it, as it may be a helpful discourse for more than just a few folks on Facebook.

Here's his post:

To all of my Black or mixed race FB friends, I must profess a blissful ignorance of this "White Privilege" of which I'm apparently guilty of possessing. By not being able to fully put myself in the shoes of someone from a background/race/religion/gender/nationality/body type that differs from my own makes me part of the problem, according to what I'm now hearing. Despite my treating everyone with respect and humor my entire life (as far as I know), I'm somehow complicit in the misfortune of others. I'm not saying I'm colorblind, but whatever racism/sexism/other -ism my life experience has instilled in me stays within me, and is not manifested in the way I treat others (which is not the case with far too many, I know).

So that I may be enlightened, can you please share with me some examples of institutional racism that have made an indelible mark upon you? If I am to understand this, I need people I know personally to show me how I'm missing what's going on. Personal examples only. I'm not trying to be insensitive, I only want to understand (but not from the media). I apologize if this comes off as crass or offends anyone.

Here's my response:

Hi, Jason. First off, I hope you don't mind that I've quoted your post and made it part of mine. I think the heart of what you've asked of your friends of color is extremely important and I think my response needs much more space than as a reply on your feed. I truly thank you for wanting to understand what you are having a hard time understanding. Coincidentally, over the last few days I have been thinking about sharing some of the incidents of prejudice/racism I've experienced in my lifetime-in fact I just spoke with my sister Lesa about how to best do this yesterday-because I realized many of my friends-especially the white ones-have no idea what I've experienced/dealt with unless they were present (and aware) when it happened. There are two reasons for this: 1) because not only as a human being do I suppress the painful and uncomfortable in an effort to make it go away, I was also taught within my community (I was raised in the '70s and '80s-it's shifted somewhat now) and by society at large NOT to make a fuss, speak out, or rock the boat. To just "deal with it," lest more trouble follow (which, sadly, it often does); 2) fear of being questioned or dismissed with "Are you sure that's what you heard?" or "Are you sure that's what they meant?" and being angered and upset all over again by well-meaning-but-hurtful and essentially unsupportive responses.

White privilege in this situation is being able to move into a "nice" neighborhood and be accepted not harassed.

So, again, I'm glad you asked, because I really want to answer. But as I do, please know a few things first: 1) This is not even close to the whole list. I'm cherry-picking because none of us have all day; 2) I've been really lucky. Most of what I share below is mild compared to what others in my family and community have endured; 3) I'm going to go in chronological order so you might begin to glimpse the tonnage and why what many white folks might feel is a "where did all of this come from?" moment in society has been festering individually and collectively for the LIFETIME of pretty much every black or brown person living in America today, regardless of wealth or opportunity; 4) Some of what I share covers sexism, too-intersectionality is another term I'm sure you've heard and want to put quotes around, but it's a real thing too, just like white privilege. But you've requested a focus on personal experiences with racism, so here it goes:

1. When I was 3, my family moved into an upper-middle-class, all-white neighborhood. We had a big backyard, so my parents built a pool. Not the only pool on the block, but the only one neighborhood boys started throwing rocks into. White boys. One day my mom ID'd one as the boy from across the street, went to his house, told his mother, and, fortunately, his mother believed mine. My mom not only got an apology, but also had that boy jump in our pool and retrieve every single rock. No more rocks after that. Then mom even invited him to come over to swim sometime if he asked permission. Everyone became friends. This one has a happy ending because my mom was and is badass about matters like these, but I hope you can see that the white privilege in this situation is being able to move into a "nice" neighborhood and be accepted not harassed, made to feel unwelcome, or prone to acts of vandalism and hostility.

2. When my older sister was 5, a white boy named Mark called her a "nigger" after she beat him in a race at school. She didn't know what it meant, but in her gut she knew it was bad. This was the first time I'd seen my father the kind of angry that has nowhere to go. I somehow understood it was because not only had some boy verbally assaulted his daughter and had gotten away with it, it had way too early introduced her (and me) to that term and the reality of what it meant-that some white people would be cruel and careless with black people's feelings just because of our skin color. Or our achievement. If it's unclear in any way, the point here is if you've never had a defining moment in your childhood or your life where you realize your skin color alone makes other people hate you, you have white privilege.

I remember some white male classmates were pissed that a black classmate had gotten into UCLA while they didn't.

3. Sophomore year of high school. I had Mr. Melrose for Algebra 2. Some time within the first few weeks of class, he points out that I'm "the only spook" in the class. This was meant to be funny. It wasn't. So, I doubt it will surprise you I was relieved when he took medical leave after suffering a heart attack and was replaced by a sub for the rest of the semester. The point here is, if you've never been 'the only one' of your race in a class, at a party, on a job, etc. and/or it's been pointed out in a "playful" fashion by the authority figure in said situation, you have white privilege.

4. When we started getting our college acceptances senior year, I remember some white male classmates were pissed that a black classmate had gotten into UCLA while they didn't. They said that affirmative action had given him "their spot" and it wasn't fair. An actual friend of theirs. Who'd worked his ass off. The point here is, if you've never been on the receiving end of the assumption that when you've achieved something it's only because it was taken away from a white person who "deserved it," you have white privilege.

5. When I got accepted to Harvard (as a fellow AP student, you were witness to what an academic beast I was in high school, yes?), three separate times I encountered white strangers as I prepped for my maiden trip to Cambridge that rankle to this day. The first was the white doctor giving me a physical at Kaiser:

Me: "I need to send an immunization report to my college so I can matriculate."

Doctor: "Where are you going?"

Me: "Harvard."

Doctor: "You mean the one in Massachusetts?"

The second was in a store, looking for supplies I needed from Harvard's suggested "what to bring with you" list.

Store employee: "Where are you going?"

Me: "Harvard."

Store employee: "You mean the one in Massachusetts?"

The third was at UPS, shipping off boxes of said "what to bring" to Harvard. I was in line behind a white boy mailing boxes to Princeton and in front of a white woman sending her child's boxes to wherever.

Woman to the boy: "What college are you going to?" Boy: "Princeton."

Woman: "Congratulations!"

Woman to me: "Where are you sending your boxes?" Me: "Harvard."

Woman: "You mean the one in Massachusetts?"

I think: "No, bitch, the one downtown next to the liquor store." But I say, gesturing to my LABELED boxes: "Yes, the one in Massachusetts."

Then she says congratulations, but it's too fucking late. The point here is, if no one has ever questioned your intellectual capabilities or attendance at an elite institution based solely on your skin color, you have white privilege.

6. In my freshman college tutorial, our small group of 4-5 was assigned to read Thoreau, Emerson, Malcolm X, Joseph Conrad, Dreiser, etc. When it was the week to discuss The Autobiography of Malcolm X, one white boy boldly claimed he couldn't even get through it because he couldn't relate and didn't think he should be forced to read it. I don't remember the words I said, but I still remember the feeling-I think it's what doctors refer to as chandelier pain-as soon as a sensitive area on a patient is touched, they shoot through the roof-that's what I felt. I know I said something like my whole life I've had to read "things that don't have anything to do with me or that I relate to" but I find a way anyway because that's what learning is about-trying to understand other people's perspectives. The point here is-the canon of literature studied in the United States, as well as the majority of television and movies, have focused primarily on the works or achievements of white men. So, if you have never experienced or considered how damaging it is/was/could be to grow up without myriad role models and images in school that reflect you in your required reading material or in the mainstream media, you have white privilege.

7. All seniors at Harvard are invited to a fancy, seated group lunch with our respective dorm masters. (Yes, they were called "masters" up until this February, when they changed it to "faculty deans," but that's just a tasty little side dish to the main course of this remembrance). While we were being served by the Dunster House cafeteria staff-the black ladies from Haiti and Boston who ran the line daily (I still remember Jackie's kindness and warmth to this day)-Master Sally mused out loud how proud they must be to be serving the nation's best and brightest. I don't know if they heard her, but I did, and it made me uncomfortable and sick. The point here is, if you've never been blindsided when you are just trying to enjoy a meal by a well-paid faculty member's patronizing and racist assumptions about how grateful black people must feel to be in their presence, you have white privilege.

He was getting stopped by cops constantly because he was a black man in a luxury car.

8. While I was writing on a television show in my 30s, my new white male boss-who had only known me for a few days-had unbeknownst to me told another writer on staff he thought I was conceited, didn't know as much I thought I did, and didn't have the talent I thought I had. And what exactly had happened in those few days? I disagreed with a pitch where he suggested our lead female character carelessly leave a potholder on the stove, burning down her apartment. This character being a professional caterer. When what he said about me was revealed months later (by then he'd come to respect and rely on me), he apologized for prejudging me because I was a black woman. I told him he was ignorant and clearly had a lot to learn. It was a good talk because he was remorseful and open. But the point here is, if you've never been on the receiving end of a boss's prejudiced, uninformed "how dare she question my ideas" badmouthing based on solely on his ego and your race, you have white privilege.

9. On my very first date with my now husband, I climbed into his car and saw baby wipes on the passenger-side floor. He said he didn't have kids, they were just there to clean up messes in the car. I twisted to secure my seatbelt and saw a stuffed animal in the rear window. I gave him a look. He said, "I promise, I don't have kids. That's only there so I don't get stopped by the police." He then told me that when he drove home from work late at night, he was getting stopped by cops constantly because he was a black man in a luxury car and they assumed that either it was stolen or he was a drug dealer. When he told a cop friend about this, Warren was told to put a stuffed animal in the rear window because it would change "his profile" to that of a family man and he was much less likely to be stopped. The point here is, if you've never had to mask the fruits of your success with a floppy-eared, stuffed bunny rabbit so you won't get harassed by the cops on the way home from your gainful employment (or never had a first date start this way), you have white privilege.

10. Six years ago, I started a Facebook page that has grown into a website called Good Black News because I was shocked to find there were no sites dedicated solely to publishing the positive things black people do. (And let me explain here how biased the coverage of mainstream media is in case you don't already have a clue-as I curate, I can't tell you how often I have to swap out a story's photo to make it as positive as the content. Photos published of black folks in mainstream media are very often sullen- or angry-looking. Even when it's a positive story! I also have to alter headlines constantly to 1) include a person's name and not have it just be "Black Man Wins Settlement" or "Carnegie Hall Gets 1st Black Board Member," or 2) rephrase it from a subtle subjugator like "ABC taps Viola Davis as Series Lead" to "Viola Davis Lands Lead on ABC Show" as is done for, say, Jennifer Aniston or Steven Spielberg. I also receive a fair amount of highly offensive racist trolling. I don't even respond. I block and delete ASAP. The point here is, if you've never had to rewrite stories and headlines or swap photos while being trolled by racists when all you're trying to do on a daily basis is promote positivity and share stories of hope and achievement and justice, you have white privilege.

Trust me, nobody is mad at you for being white. Nobody.

OK, Jason, there's more, but I'm exhausted. And my kids need dinner. Remembering and reliving many of these moments has been a strain and a drain (and, again, this ain't even the half or the worst of it). But I hope my experiences shed some light for you on how institutional and personal racism have affected the entire life of a friend of yours to whom you've only been respectful and kind. I hope what I've shared makes you realize it's not just strangers, but people you know and care for who have suffered and are suffering because we are excluded from the privilege you have not to be judged, questioned, or assaulted in any way because of your race.

As to you "being part of the problem," trust me, nobody is mad at you for being white. Nobody. Just like nobody should be mad at me for being black. Or female. Or whatever. But what IS being asked of you is to acknowledge that white privilege DOES exist and not only to treat people of races that differ from yours "with respect and humor," but also to stand up for fair treatment and justice, not to let "jokes" or "off-color" comments by friends, co-workers, or family slide by without challenge, and to continually make an effort to put yourself in someone else's shoes, so we may all cherish and respect our unique and special contributions to society as much as we do our common ground.

With much love and respect,

Lori

This article was originally published by Good Black News. It has been edited for YES! Magazine.

Read more of on White privilege and racial justice:
10 Examples That Prove White Privilege Exists in Every Aspect Imaginable The Language of Antiracism Leveraging White Privilege for Racial Justice
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My White Friend Asked Me on Facebook to Explain White Privilege. I Decided to Be Honest - YES! Magazine

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He wanted to know how institutional racism has made an impact on my life. I'm glad he asked, because I was ready to answer.

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Abstract

INTRODUCTION

With these thoughts in mind, it seems fitting to consider how far statues and public memorials in the nation's capital represent Britain's involvement in both transatlantic slavery and its abolition. London was the largest slaving port in late Stuart times, and the City remained the commercial centre of what was, by the Georgian era, the world's premier slaving nation. Despite this, London's public monuments and their connections with slavery have remained curiously under-researched. Yet, as this article will first demonstrate, a significant proportion of the individuals commemorated by public statues in London during the long eighteenth century had important links with the slave-trade or plantation slavery. Such links need to be unearthed, contextualized and made explicit. As Seymour Drescher has remarked, 'monuments alone will not, in themselves, stimulate a constant rethinking of the past. That remains the task of historians'.

It will further be argued that those statues, monuments and memorials which do explicitly mention slavery and the slave-trade - those honouring abolitionists - generally marginalize the experience of enslaved Africans in favour of a self-congratulatory and nationally defensive political agenda. Such an agenda logically derives, in part at least, from the tradition of figurative statuary in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which favoured the portrayal of individuals or small groups - unlike the more abstract considerations of mass suffering or resistance in much late twentieth-century memorialization. In part, too, it derives from the particular political context in which each specific public monument was conceived, sponsored and placed on view.

Even now, it is difficult to ascertain just what statues exist in London, let alone which might be confidently associated with the transatlantic slave-trade. Philip Ward-Jackson's magisterial book Public Sculpture in the City of London (2003) has made important inroads in identifying London statues, but his efforts are of course restricted to the City itself. An on-line catalogue is being developed by the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association as part of its National Recording Project. This has built upon both the 1910 survey of outdoor monuments by the London County Council and the four-volume list of monuments in London published in 1924; its remit is broader, but it is as yet incomplete.

What follows is not an exhaustive survey of Greater London's slavery-related statues, but an invitation to look anew at familiar pieces and to reconsider their meaning in the light of new research and approaches.

The article falls into three main parts. It first considers some of the silences around slavery as exemplified by a number of London's public statues erected between late seventeenth and the late eighteenth centuries. The premise adopted is that if statues were raised in the public arena to those who had significant and direct involvement in the slave-trade or slave-plantations then it is worth making this fact plain. Enquiring how such involvement was acknowledged or ignored at the time is a legitimate historical task, especially for those with a political interest in the present commemoration of slavery. Many Black Britons today, for example, feel personally excluded by the public commemorative conventions of their country. If monuments are about remembering, who or what gets 'forgotten' in the public discourse can be just as significant. As has been observed elsewhere, there is a tendency 'to suppress what is not meaningful or intuitively satisfying in the collective memories of the past'.

The second part of this study discusses memorials and statues dedicated to British anti-slavery campaigners put up in the nineteenth century, asking who was celebrated and why?

The third section considers, so far as we can discern it, the subsequent 'social life' of these memorials. How have such statues and memorials been received? What impact have they had on the public consciousness? What has been the relationship between the transatlantic slave-system, 'dead' statues and the 'theatre' of popular historical memory?

This article cannot fully answer these last points but it can raise them as issues that demand further empirical investigation. In considering statues and other public memorials as 'memory texts' we need to ask how they have 'been mediated, articulated, assimilated, incorporated or co-opted by the various institutions or domains of the public sphere'.

PUBLIC STATUES, PHILANTHROPISTS AND THE REPRESENTATION OF SLAVERY

In 1834, the Parliamentary Act purporting to free enslaved Africans in the British colonies took effect. A century later, in 1934, this Act was commemorated in London by a series of summer church services and a formal meeting that autumn at the City's Mansion House. An account of that meeting was published in The Times under the title, 'An End to Slavery: Task which Began in the City'.

London's Lord Mayor, Sir Stephen Killik, addressed this gathering, which had been convened by the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society. There Killik expressed his particular pleasure that the meeting had been held at the Mansion House, ... for the great task had begun under its roof. The City had been deeply concerned and it was at the Mansion House church of St Mary Woolnoth that Wilberforce was induced to devote his life to the freeing of the slaves.

We do not know if the Lord Mayor also mentioned that the sermon Wilberforce had found so inspirational had been preached by the ex-slave-trader turned abolitionist, John Newton (1725-1807), who was then St Mary Woolnoth's vicar. In any case, Killik certainly went on to suggest that the City had been an abolitionist stronghold. He informed his audience that the abolitionist Granville Sharp had been a member of a City Livery Company (the Fishmongers). Sharp, he contended, had been supported by Sir Robert Kite, Lord Mayor who in 1767 ruled in favour of a mistreated slave, Jonathan Strong. condemned the slave-trade as a regrettable one and was reported to have said he was sure that 'pubic opinion would never rest until such inhuman traffic was finally stamped out'. At a commemorative event in another City church, St Botolph's, Bishopsgate, held earlier in 1934, the City was similarly presented as a focal point for antislavery activity.

This comfortable version of the City's history was selective at best. Killik had chosen his dates well. In actual fact, City merchants had been crucial to the development of the transatlantic slave-trade and the plantation economy it serviced. So whilst it was true that by the 1760s the slave-trade was beginning to be questioned in some circles, in the century before City merchants had been involved in the development of Caribbean slave-plantations and in the management of the Royal African Company, from 1672 when it was set up. By the 1690s London merchants excluded from such Royal monopolies were clamouring for a share in the African and West Indian trade.

The first known proposal for a public statue in London referring explicitly to Caribbean slavery took issue with the City's complicity in the cruelties of the slave-system. Published in 1682, a brief pamphlet by the Anglican Rev. Morgan Godwin, entitled The REVIVAL: or directions for a Sculpture, describing the extraordinary Care and Diligence of our Nation in publishing the Faith among Infidels In America, and elsewhere, called for a sculpture to be placed in the city portraying the barbarity of a slave-master in no uncertain terms. The centrepiece of the sculpture was to show

an Overseer (... to some English Planter in America) whipping and most unmercifully tormenting a poor Negro-Slave under his Governance, for no other Crime but for having been that day (Sunday) baptised. In his right Hand (held aloft) place a long Willow Rod ... ; and by him a large Bundle of the like Rods to be spent upon the Wretch, for that Offence: Out of his Mouth these Blasphemous Words proceeding, Ye Dog, as you were baptized in the morning with Water, so in the Afternoon ye shall be baptised in Blood. The Negro tyed by both his Wrists up to a Rafter or Beam; deep marks of each Stroak appearing upon his Flesh, and drops of Blood in abundance issuing or starting out of his Body, stript quite naked.

If Godwin's plans for a sculpture were more rhetorical than practical, the idea driving them was clear. Godwin was not the only Anglican of his day to advocate the conversion of enslaved Africans and favouring conversion of the slaves in this period by no means implied being anti-slavery. Nevertheless, his pamphlet established the concept for a statue which placed the suffering of the enslaved African centre stage in the nation's capital.

Unsurprisingly, Godwin's discomfiting proposal fell on stony ground. Monuments conveying the image of a benign City, liberal in its sentiments and fond of freedom, were much preferable amongst the London elite in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Commemorative statues were a way of grooming the image of the City itself. For 'polite people', as a critic noted in 1734, 'are most distinguished as such by their buildings, their statues and their inscriptions'.

The public statues erected drew on the talents of such prominent sculptors as Roubilliac, Rysbrack and Grinling Gibbons to represent contemporary City worthies as benefactors and philanthropists, which of course they were. Their other professional and commercial activities were however, more elliptically described.

The London statues set up between 1700 to 1779 to commemorate private individuals (apart from royals and nobility and those commemorated inside churches, cathedrals and private homes) include those of a dozen or so merchants or professional men, at a time when it was still relatively novel to sculpt someone not a noble or member of the royal family. At least half are of men with links to the African trade or slave plantations: Sir John Moore (1620-1702), Sir Robert Clayton (1629-1707) [ fig. 1], Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1707) [ fig. 2], Sir John Cass (1660-1718) [ fig. 3], Thomas Guy (1645-1774) [ figs 4, 5, 6], and William Beckford (1709-1770) [ fig. 7]. Of these all but Guy and Sloane were major players in that trade.

But what does it matter if these 'dead' statues whose identities are known to few today had slaving interests? It could be argued that such men cannot fairly be characterized as 'representing' slavery interests since that was not the intention of their commemorators nor, so far as we know, was it part of their own self-image. The late seventeenth century in particular, arguably, was a time when slavery was such a part of the fabric of things that no-one (aside from Godwyn, Aphra Behn and a few 'eccentric' visionaries) could have had the conceptual armoury to contest it. Yet the way these men were memorialized contributed to a culture of silence around the City's collusion with slavery in all its cruelty. Their representations convey a sanitized self-image which in turned influenced the nation's notion of itself. That they have not since been critically scrutinized in this regard only perpetuates this silence.

The London statues in question were public in the sense of being in a non-private space, one accessible, to varying degrees, by the city's inhabitants. But they were not public in the sense of being paid for by public taxation. All of the statues mentioned were paid for by private patronage or 'public' subscription, that is, the raising of monies from the small and select minority of people who had the means to contribute.

The statue of Sir Robert Clayton (1629-1707) originally stood at the main gate of Old St Thomas's Hospital in Southwark and is now at the hospital's later Lambeth site. Clayton had a truly meteoric career. One of London's great early merchant bankers and an early governor of the Bank of England, he was portrayed in Dryden and Tate's Absalom and Achitophel, Defoe's Roxanna and Evelyn's Diary. The statue of Clayton by Grinling Gibbons [see above, fig. 1] was apparently commissioned by the Governors of St Thomas's Hospital after he gave £600 for the hospital's rebuilding. It shows an imposing figure draped in the gold chain of a Chief Magistrate and dressed in magnificent robes. At Christ's Hospital a tablet still proclaims his virtues as Hospital President and Vice President of the 'New Work House', 'citizen and Lord Mayor of London', 'a bountiful benefactor', 'just magistrate' and (in reference to his Whig views) a 'brave defender of the Liberty and Religion'.

[who] gave the company a more solid backing than the ephemeral enthusiasm of a Shaftesbury or an Arlington, their very presence inspiring confidence in the company and thereby helping it to appear 'a better prospect' than it was.

During the 1680s Clayton became well established as a factor in Bermuda at a time when the smuggling of slaves into the colony was rife. His influence in Bermuda was reportedly greater than that of the island's Governor and in 1689 he was made a Commissioner of Customs.

Like his Whiggish counterpart, Clayton, John Cass was also a City Alderman, but in the Tory interest. Though never Lord Mayor, Cass served as Sheriff then as Member of Parliament for the City of London and became a Knight of the Realm. He too was involved in the slave-trade, being a member of the Royal African Company's Court of Assistants from 1705 to 1708. The Company records show him (then 'Colonel John Cass of Hackney') to have been on their 'committee of correspondence' which directly dealt with slave-agents in the African forts and in the Caribbean. We know too that Cass retained shares in the Royal African Company until his death. Cass, like Clayton, also seems to have been linked by family and friends to colonial plantation interests, in his case to Virginia. His statue by Roubiliac, erected in 1745, shows a less magnificent figure than those of Clayton or Moore, more bourgeois, more crumpled, but he is still a man of substance. The later replica of this statue [see above, fig. 3] on the exterior of the old Cass Foundation building, in Jewry St, ensures that Cass is still remembered as the founder of an educational charity.

The statues of Thomas Guy and Sir Hans Sloane are better known to Londoners today than those of Cass and Clayton. Their respective relationships to slavery are also of a different order. Guy, the founder of Guy's Hospital, was never a member of the Royal African Company but his ownership of South Sea stock makes him relevant to our interests. Of course shares in this company were widely held, but Guy had an exceptionally large stake. He possessed over £45,000 worth of South Sea Company shares which he astutely sold at inflated prices shortly before the bubble so famously burst. It was from this that Guy 'made his vast fortune'. So this fortune was made from a company whose main purpose was to sell slaves to the Spanish Colonies. There are two memorials to Guy at Guy's Hospital. The earlier is a bronze statue sculpted by Thomas Scheermakers and erected in 1734 [ fig. 4]. A relief at its base shows Guy offering a helping hand to a semi-naked white man, seated, who represents London's sick poor [ fig. 5]. This motif is repeated in the later John Bacon memorial of 1774, in the chapel at Guy's [ fig. 6]. There the pose of the sick man is revised in a way which interestingly anticipates a non-racialized variant of the 'standing soldier and the kneeling slave' image used in abolitionist propaganda.

As for Hans Sloane, the connection, different again, is similarly occluded. Author of The Natural History of Jamaica, Sloane is now best known as the founder of the British Museum and a President of the Royal Society. The fine statue by Michael Rysbrack [see above, fig. 2], has been at the British Museum since 1985 and a replica now stands at its original location in the Chelsea Physick Garden. These two sites remind us of Sloane's roles as both naturalist and benefactor. Yet his rise in London society was made possible by an astute marriage, in 1695, to a West Indian heiress. The daughter of the London Alderman John Langley, Elizabeth was a wealthy widow in her own right, having been previously married to the Jamaican sugar-plantation owner Fulk Rose. 'The marriage was an advantageous one for Sloane, since his wife inherited not only her father's estate but also one third of the income from her former husband's properties in Jamaica.' It is evident then that Sloane owned slaves and that financial dependence on slave-labour helped to underwrite his career as a 'disinterested' naturalist and medical man.

The historical remembrances of Sir John Moore, Sir Robert Clayton, Sir John Cass, Hans Sloane and Thomas Guy were shaped by the statues which survive them and by the charitable foundations which they endowed and which in some cases bear their name. Their legacies are presented in ways which render the connection between their philanthropy and their slavery interests invisible. Arguably, this may either be because slavery was unquestioned at the time or because, like other exploitative aspects of wealth creation, it was thought inappropriate for mention in a celebratory commemoration. Whatever the original reasons, these statues have helped to perpetuate the disassociation between these successful men and slavery.

By the 1770s, a changing intellectual and religious climate meant that slavery began to cause increasing moral unease in middling and some elite circles. The slave-trade itself was no longer the official province of royal monopolies. This made possible a defensive disconnection between those who actively and directly traded in the dirty business of slaving and more aristocratic and refined figures who simply inherited slave-plantations or traded in slave-produced commodities.

The evidence linking William Beckford (1709-70) to slavery is widely available and overwhelming. Beckford, twice Lord Mayor, was the free-spending son of a wealthy sugar planter and owed much of his position to his ownership of some 3,000 Africans enslaved on his numerous Jamaican plantations. This certainly did not impede the commissioning of an unabashedly celebratory monument to him in London's Guildhall soon after his death in 1770, where he was extolled for his vigorous defence of the 'City's traditional liberties' [ fig. 7]. This piece, by J. F. Moore, shows Beckford flanked by the allegorical figures of Britannia and Commerce and evokes the virile energy of a man who, as it happens, was notorious for his rakish lifestyle. The irony implicit in portraying a slaveholder as an upholder of civic liberty seems to have escaped the notice of his Guildhall associates, though his slave-holding was criticized in other quarters.

A point to make about all the statues of these men is that despite poses which are often formulaic they do celebrate them as particular individuals. By contrast, common people were not accorded individual attention. Africans in this period, when represented at all, are also depersonalized and their connection with enslavement is made visible but sanitized.

A case in point is a series of painted panels commissioned in 1696 which allude to enslavement but avoid its actual significance. Though outside our remit of statues, these panels are worth discussing briefly as they were created when Cass, Clayton and Moore were in their prime and help us understand the mental world which they inhabited. Now installed in the premises of Sir John Cass's Foundation Primary School in Aldgate, the panels were originally at a private merchant's house in St Botolph's Lane. Executed by the much sought-after City painter Robert Robinson, they portray a fantastical and ethnically blurred idyll of happy natives and other tropical exotica. One entitled 'The Cultivation of Tobacco' shows an African-looking labourer bending over tobacco plants in front of a western-style shack. The botanically accurate depiction of the tobacco plants and the western style of the shack implicitly indicate a plantation. Though the identity of the owner of 'the painted room' has not been definitively established, it seems likely to have been a well-known tobacco merchant, possibly the tobacco magnate Sir Jeffrey Jeffries, a neighbour and friend of Sir John Cass.

BRITISH LIBERTY ILLUMINATED: THE ANTI-SLAVERY MEMORIALS

If the statues of these benefactors and merchants side-step the subject of slavery, what then of the various monuments in London expressly dedicated to anti-slavery campaigners? What do they tell us about official and unofficial attitudes to slavery in their time? To answer this we must reflect on which anti-slavery campaigners were selected for such commemoration, how their monuments were framed, and how they were subsequently and variously responded to by different interests in society at different times. Such an approach should yield some insights about the way official and unofficial remembrances of slavery have evolved.

Few statues or other memorials inside the Abbey were commissioned by the state, most were sponsored by 'groups of interested people who sought to gain permission to place their "private" commemoration in the public domain ... [motivated by] awareness that if successful, the memorialized person or event would garner collective, national recognition. ...' And of course, statues and memorials located in the Abbey conferred a particularly coveted status on the person so honoured. The Dean and Chapter of the Abbey charged a fee or 'fine' to those lucky enough to gain permission to place a memorial there. With one exception, the abolitionists honoured in the Abbey were specifically associated with Anglican Evangelicalism.

The first memorial which explicitly celebrated the anti-slavery stance of a public figure is a wall tablet and deserves inclusion here. Dedicated in 1816 to Granville Sharp (1752-1806), it was financed by the African Institution of London, the body which superseded the London Abolition Committee. The Abbey holds no documentation for this tablet. It is a modest affair, a tombstone shape with a profile of Sharp carved into the top centre of the slab flanked on one side by a lion (with both African and British associations) and on the other by the emblematic figure of a kneeling male slave, reminiscent of the figure so successfully used in Wedgwood's abolitionist medallions and so endlessly replicated in abolitionist discourse.

The inscription on the Sharp tablet is lengthy, first stressing his Anglican credentials ('born and educated in the bosom of the Church of England' for whose institutions he had 'the most unshaken regard') and establishing him as a virtuous man 'freed by competence from the necessity and by content from the desire of lucrative occupation'. Sharp is portrayed as one whose sole aim was to 'improve the condition of mankind'. His efforts to end the slave-trade are praised in terms which suggest discomfort about the contradiction between Britain's self-image as the beacon of Liberty and its dependency upon slave-labour:

He aimed to rescue his native country from the guilt and inconsistency of employing the arm of freedom to rivet the fetters of bondage and established for the Negro race, in the person of [James] Somerset, the long disputed rights of human nature. Having, in this glorious cause, triumphed over the combined resistance of interest, prejudice, and pride, he took his part among the foremost of the Honourable band associated to deliver Africa from the rapacity of Europe by the Abolition of the Slave Trade; nor was death permitted to interrupt his usefulness till he had witnessed that Act of the British Parliament by which 'the Abolition' was decreed.

The inscription is an intriguing mixture of political radicalism and ethnocentric paternalism, possibly reflecting a tussle between radical and conservative members within the African institution under its new president, Sir Robert Harry Inglis, whose 'evangelicalism was sometimes obscured by his passionate commitment to the establishment and to church order'.

The often ignored contradiction between Britain as champion of both human liberty and slave-trading is made explicit; Europe is characterized as 'rapacious' in its treatment of 'Africa'; human rights, so 'long disputed' are affirmed. But Africa and the 'negro race' are spoken of as passive objects of white benevolence: Africa is ' delivered ' from Europe by an 'honourable band' (of Englishmen); human rights are 'established ... for the Negro race'; the personhood of James Somerset is eclipsed by his racial identity, and use of the term 'Negro race' reminds us that a more racialized discourse around enslaved Africans is on the ascendant.

Sharp was also memorialized by a bust erected in 1824 in the council chamber at the Court of Common Council in Guildhall, with a more rousing inscription: 'GRANVILLE SHARP, TO WHOM ENGLAND OWES THE GLORIOUS VERDICT OF HER HIGHEST COURT OF LAW, THAT THE SLAVE WHO SETS HIS FOOT ON BRITISH GROUND BECOMES AT THAT INSTANT FREE', though it was in fact mistaken about the legal implications of the Somerset case. Lord Mansfield's judgement, far from liberating all slaves resident in England, simply prevented their being forcibly 'repatriated' back to the plantations. Such a misconstruction acted as a form of wish-fulfilment, distancing, in a rhetorical sense at least, 'free England' from any further taint of involvement in Caribbean slavery.

By far the grandest of the Abbey memorials under discussion is that dedicated to Charles James Fox (1749-1806). Sculpted by Sir Richard Westmacott in 1822, and costing the 'enormous sum' of £6,000, its execution coincided with the relaunching of the anti-slavery movement by Thomas Clarkson and others after the abolition of the slave-trade. The choice of Westmacott as sculptor is relevant here. Westmacott and his family had West Indian links. He himself was married to the daughter of a wealthy Jamaican doctor and he and his Uncle Henry executed a number of commissions in the West Indies. If Westmacott's statue of Nelson in Barbados is his best-known work there, he also sculpted church monuments to planters and military heroes in Grenada, Barbados and Jamaica. Despite his identification as the sculptor of liberal heroes, in his own early career he did not scruple to portray slave-owning planters as disconnected from the illiberal business of slavery itself. This inconsistency continued even after the abolition of the slave-trade. It was Westmacott who sculpted in 1809 a statue celebrating Robert Milligan, West Indian merchant, slaveholder and founder of London's West India Docks, which were substantially financed by planter interests [ fig. 7].

The Fox monument had even grander backers, including among others, Lords Bedford, Devonshire, Spencer and the Prince Regent himself. It was finished in 1815 but the coronation of George IV delayed its installation until 1822. In the interim Westmacott himself (still 'Mr') negotiated on behalf of his sponsors with officials at Westminster Abbey to expedite matters: 'it would he knows gratify the Duke [of Bedford] [and Lord Holland] exceedingly to hear the work was proceeding'.

The completed monument in the Abbey is a grand and much-praised neo-classical piece [ fig. 8]. Executed in white marble its central feature is a larger-than-life figure of Fox surrounded by three equally large allegorical figures. Two are female virtues, Peace and Liberty; the third is a male figure variously described as 'anonymous grateful slave', the personification of Africa or simply, in Westmacott's words, 'an African Negro'. In an arrangement reportedly inspired by 'similarly posed figures found in Roman sarcophagi', the reclining Fox 'expires in the arms of Liberty' whilst Peace weeps at his feet and the African prays, kneeling alongside. This last figure is commonly supposed to personify the gratitude of enslaved Africans to Fox for his abolitionist exertions. Significantly, in some quarters, the idea of 'the slave' is still conflated with a more general personification of Africa. In either case, this figure occupies a symbolic space somewhere between the purely metaphorical female emblems of Peace and Liberty on the one hand and the historically specific figure of Fox himself.

So much money (over twelve hundred pounds) had been raised for the monument, that there was enough to pay Westmacott to sculpt an additional nine-foot bronze statue of Fox, in 1816, which stands in Bloomsbury Square. There, Fox, his squat form disguised by Roman drapery, grasps the Magna Carta, and no allusion is made to his abolitionist activities.

The third Abbey statue to be considered here is the Wilberforce monument, which Oldfield treats in his recent study [ fig. 10]. Like the Sharp tablet this was funded by a Committee, headed by Sir Robert Harry Inglis and including Wilberforce's political heir, Thomas Fowell Buxton. If the prestige of a sculptor indicates the status and means of the patrons, it may be significant that this monument was sculpted in 1838 by a respected but relatively obscure sculptor, Samuel Joseph. (Joseph produced thirty busts, four statues and five monuments in his lifetime, but was to die poor and bankrupt in 1850.) He had sculpted a well-regarded bust of Wilberforce for the Yorkshire School for the Blind shortly after Wilberforce's death and the head of that bust is generally thought to be a study for the Abbey monument.

A surviving preliminary sketch by Joseph shows Wilberforce sitting with a book (probably the Bible) and in his slippers. Why was he not portrayed as a Roman hero as Fox had been? We are told that Joseph, a keen phrenologist noted for his 'idiosyncratic naturalism', followed in the path of Sir Francis Chantrey whose statue of James Watt first challenged the 'dead hand' of neo-classicism. Certainly the Wilberforce piece is highly naturalistic and contrasts strikingly with the Romanized personifications of others in the north aisle. One contemporary criticized it as 'too full of motion and too animated', exhibiting the 'properties of portrait painting', 'rather than the repose thought proper to all monumental statues'. But for all its artistic daring the statue plays down the radicalism of Wilberforce's anti-slavery campaign. What we have here is not Wilberforce the fiery anti-slavery orator but Wilberforce the venerable Clapham saint, whose disturbingly penetrating eyes alone bespeak an inner spiritual power, Wilberforce the veteran parliamentarian rendered loveable through long service and infirmity.

Joseph may have wished to capture the individual in all his uniqueness, but for Sir Robert Inglis the appeal of this statue was perhaps that it implicitly marginalized the challenge which Wilberforce had posed to vested political interests. Such an interpretation is reinforced by the monument's dedication. This proclaims that Wilberforce's name

will ever be specially identified with those exertions which by the blessing of GOD removed from England the Guilt of the African Slave Trade, and Prepared the way for the abolition of Slavery in

Every colony of the Empire.

In the prosecution of these objects

He relied, not in vain on GOD:

But in the Progress he was called to endure

Great Obloquy and Great Opposition: he outlived, however, all Enmity

Although there had been opposition to him at the time, then, all that, the dedication implies, was now long past. Not only did Wilberforce and his cause triumph in the end, but he removed 'from England' 'Guilt' about slavery. Slavery is over and that is that. Yet even as this dedication was being carved slaves had not been fully emancipated. A rigid 'apprenticeship' system which in practical terms replicated many features of the old slave-system required adults, as Drescher reminds us, 'to devote three-quarters of their time to the service of their former owners in return for good and clothing'. Even after 1838, when the apprenticeship system was ended, following a vociferous public campaign, Caribbean slaves were still disenfranchised and often in want. And as has often lately been remarked, unlike their owners who were awarded £20 million for their loss, enslaved Africans were never compensated for their labour. This version of Wilberforce's achievement disconnects both Britain and the British Caribbean from slavery's continuing legacy.

The subject of guilt comes up again in the memorial in the Westminster Abbey dedicated to Zachary Macaulay (1768-1838) [ fig. 11]. This wall tablet includes a full-size bust of Macaulay in Roman drapery, at whose base appears yet again the motif of the kneeling slave. Macaulay's expressive face looks one way, the expressionless slave, the other. Carved by Henry Weekes in 1842, the inscription celebrates Macaulay who 'rescued the British Empire from the guilt of the slave trade and finally conferred freedom on eight hundred thousand slaves'. So again, guilt is expunged, and freedom conferred on the passive slaves by white benevolence.

The final memorial in the Abbey to be considered here is the statue of Thomas Fowell Buxton (1786-1845). In 1824, too ill to continue much longer in Parliament, Wilberforce had bequeathed his role as leader of the emancipation campaign to the Quaker M.P. for Weymouth, Thomas Fowell Buxton. It was Buxton then who guided the Emancipation Bill into law. A statue of Buxton specifically intended for the Abbey was commissioned the year after Buxton's death, in 1846, and sculpted by Frederick Thrupp [ fig. 12]. Its commission attracted some controversy as a close friend of Thrupp was on the selection board.

An increasingly racialist backlash against emancipation was evidenced by the 1849 publication of Thomas Carlyle's 'Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question' in Frasier' s Magazine, an essay republished in the ensuing decades as 'The Nigger Question'. Yet in that same year was sculpted the only public portrayal in London of an African who is not only both upright and individualized but armed as well. The figure is that of a seaman in the bas-relief at the base of Nelson's column. Its sculptor, John Edward Carew, was Irish and apparently somewhat of an outsider amongst those commissioned to carve the column base, though Sir Richard Westmacott, for whom he worked, may have helped him to get the commission. In any case, Carew's portrayal of the African was not mentioned in The Times's favourable review of his 'alto relievo', nor was any similar figure replicated elsewhere in the capital. By the 1850s, the plight of the newly-emancipated Caribbean slaves was 'no longer so exciting to the English middle-class imagination' and reformers increasingly turned their attention to eradicating formal slavery in the United States.

The statue was similarly popular in London when exhibited at the Great Exhibition in 1851, and Punch contrasted the sentiment it excited with the indifference to the plight of real-life slaves. After the emancipation of African-Americans even public statues celebrating the Union victory often employed inherently racialist iconography, which has been aptly characterized by Albert Boime as 'the abased slave' and 'the exalted liberator' motif. By this period, the administration of London's public monuments was becoming more bureaucratic. A rather piecemeal survey was undertaken in the 1860s by the Ministry of Works to list 'the public statues or monuments in London, belonging to the nation'. The thrust of commemoration seemed more military than ever: Between 1846 and 1858 most of the statues were of politicians, military heroes or royals. They included a dozen statues of eighteenth-century political figures funded by Parliament and placed in St Stephen's Hall in the Palace of Westminster. Among them were new figures of Charles James Fox and Lord Mansfield, but no explicit mention seems to have been made either to Mansfield's famous Somerset Judgement of 1772, relating to the status of slaves in England, or to Fox's abolitionist efforts.

The Buxton memorial, designed by Samuel Sanders Teulon (1812-1873), was begun in 1865, two decades after Buxton's death, and was funded by his son, Charles Buxton MP. 1865 was of course, the very year of American slave-emancipation. Until Parliament Square was completed the monument stood on the corner of Great George Street and King Street. This location was one of particular symbolic significance, being virtually under the window of the former residence of Buxton's fellow anti-slavery campaigner Stephen Lushington, where emancipationists had met informally to plan their strategy.

COMMEMORATING SLAVERY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY LONDON

For the centenary of the formal emancipation of slaves in the British Empire in 1934 no commemorative statues were commissioned, though the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery did place on view Benjamin. Haydon's picture of the World Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840. The commemoration consisted mainly of a celebratory luncheon in London arranged by the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society for 500 notables including the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Buxton and various politicians, as well as a series of church services. The Bishop of Winchester's sermon at Westminster Abbey characterized emancipation as a 'triumph of Christian teaching'. Elsewhere much was made of missionary efforts to eradicate slavery in Africa. Services culminated in a midnight event at St Botolph's in the City of London where Sir John Simon, then Foreign Secretary, and Travers Buxton, vice-president of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, spoke of the continuation of slavery in the world. The recurrence of the Buxton family name in such ceremonies reminds us of the importance of family members as advocates in the contest for commemoration. The name of Clarkson did not feature much and Olaudah Equiano's contribution to the ending of the British slave-trade, as the first published Black abolitionist, seems to have been ignored completely. So too was the name of William Knibb, the Baptist missionary, whose campaign for more political equity for apprenticed slaves and advocacy of disestablishment in Jamaica had not endeared him to the Anglican elite.

But another speaker at the St Botolph service in 1934 marked a new departure in the commemoration of this event. Dr Harold Moody, pioneering president of the League of Coloured Peoples, had also been invited and his address sounded a critically anti-racialist note amid the general chorus of pious complacency. Moody's invitation suggests that at least some in power recognized that their constituency now included Black Londoners.

All in all, few statues were erected in London during the 1930s and certainly none commemorating abolition or emancipation. The Second World War and the subsequent reconstruction of London brought new challenges to London's statuary heritage. Both the Buxton and the Lincoln monuments in Parliament Square were cleared in 1949 as part of a road-widening scheme. Debate ensued over which monuments belonged in this newly modernized but still hallowed precinct. The Lincoln statue was eventually returned to the Square, but the Buxton memorial was not.

The Buxton fountain was now thought by the Ministry of Works and others to be aesthetically sub-standard and unworthy of such an august location. Responsibility for its maintenance had long been a matter of contention, with both central and local government trying to offload it on to voluntary associations such as the National Society for Drinking Fountains and the Anti-Slavery and Aboriginal Protection Society. I incline to Stuart Burch's view that there was also a political subtext to its proposed relocation, though as a Labour minister spearheaded the relocation, the divisions were not strictly party political. Various arguments were made for the return of the Buxton memorial to the Square. One was that the Commonwealth audience comprised black as well as white members. Thus Sir Reginald Coupland, Wilberforce's first proper biographer, writing to The Times that the monument should be retained, pointed to the sensibilities of the Africans 'now fellow-members with us of the Commonwealth'. In the upper House Lord Reading and Labour peer Hugh Patterson Macmillan argued for keeping the Buxton monument in the Square as a way to confirm the nation's adherence to the new UN charter for human rights. Viscount Simon condemned the relocation as 'monstrous'. The supreme importance of the Emancipation Act which Buxton had championed, he said, 'had been completely overlooked' and 'no one who had the slightest regard for our historical traditions and the great achievements of the British Parliament should ever forget the magnificence and effect of that sustained argument'. Yet again, Buxton's descendants tended the flame of remembrance. Lord Noel Buxton proposed that a new statue, that of 'an African boy', be placed in the Square, but succeeded only getting a plinth placed which referred visitors to the Buxton Memorial's new location in Victoria Tower Park.

Buxton aside, the reinterpretation of slavery and debates over its proper commemoration were slower to surface in this post-war period. Perhaps it was in part the lack of relevant anniversaries, but so far as I know no public monuments to either enslaved Africans or British anti-slavery campaigners were erected in London in the forty years after the war.

The rededication of the Buxton memorial by the Anti-Slavery Society in 1987 seems unlikely to have been inspired by the centenary that year of Marcus Garvey's birth or by the simultaneous importation of Black History Week to Britain. Nevertheless it did indicate that the cultural climate was changing. The new stone inscription at the fountain's base made clear the explicitly abolitionist purpose of the monument, naming Buxton and his parliamentary colleagues, Wilberforce, Brougham, Lushington and Clarkson. The memorial itself however remained in poor condition.

Despite sporadic efforts over the years to get a London memorial dedicated specifically to Thomas Clarkson, it was only in 1996 that a modest plaque under the metaphorical shadow of the Wilberforce memorial finally appeared in Westminster Abbey. Its inscription to Clarkson as a 'Friend to Slaves' struck a newly humble note. The plaque was funded by a private committee set up to commemorate the 150th anniversary of his death.

Given their expense and their need for precious public space, statues are less responsive than other forms of commemoration to changing public attitudes. This has remained true even after the Labour victory of 1997, which brought with it increased public funding for Black History projects. Plaques are a far more affordable form of public memorial and susceptible to public lobbying, but even here there is a hierarchy of regard. Olaudah Equiano is memorialized in London only by a green plaque placed in 2000 at Riding House Square, where he once resided. But green plaques, funded by local Councils, are a less prestigious form of recognition than is afforded by English Heritage's blue-plaque scheme. The bicentenary has led English Heritage to reassess its properties in the light of slaving links and to name Black anti-slavery campaigners, but the strict requirements of the blue-plaque scheme still predispose it to commemorate those with well-documented links to extant buildings and so to favour the propertied and more affluent historical figures. To date, three blue plaques are dedicated to Wilberforce, one to Zachary Macaulay and none to Black antislavery campaigners such as Equiano or Mary Prince.

CONCLUSION

The bicentenary of the 1807 Act has prompted reassessment of how both slavery and abolition should be commemorated. Under New Labour's influence, those who seek funding for commemorative initiatives have now to satisfy a funding culture designed to promote political inclusion. Evidence of 'public consultation', 'transparency' and 'outreach' is exacted by the government. Bodies such as the Lottery Heritage Fund and many voluntary funding agencies to varying but significant extents have followed suit. Whatever the motives and consequences of these new requirements, and however contested, their very existence marks a sea change in the wider political culture. Opinions of a wide range of Britons have been expressly solicited, including those of African-Caribbean descent. Grass-roots projects have gained funding and, with it, access to the wider public arena. The recent proliferation of scholarship on the history of slavery and abolition has also strengthened the argument for marking the occasion.

In London alone, an imaginative array of commemorative events, exhibitions, websites and publications will mark the bicentenary. Major exhibitions include those scheduled at the Museum in Docklands, the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich and the House of Commons. The National Archive at Kew has produced new readers' guides to facilitate research into the history of slavery and abolition. English Heritage plans a trail linking its properties in London and beyond to pro and anti-slavery interests. Throughout London, concerts, lectures, film-showings and theatrical performances inspired by the theme of slavery and abolition are scheduled over the year.

But what will happen after 2007, when all the urgency and dedicated funding fades away? Leaflets and trails can so easily go out of print, websites can cease to be maintained once their initial installation is complete. Theatrical events are by their nature ephemeral. Permanent exhibitions and monuments still seem to be the most lasting form of commemoration. There will be permanent exhibitions in the London Docklands and in Liverpool and Hull.

It remains to be seen whether any permanent monuments relating to slavery will be erected. If they were, a host of intriguing problems would need to be addressed. For example, should the much smaller but still significant numbers of 'white' unfree labourers on British slave-plantations (the Irish prisoners of war, the Monmouth rebels, the transported criminals, the kidnapped street children and the indentured servants) be acknowledged? Should such a monument refer to the complicity of West African warlords in the Atlantic slave-economy? How might enslaved Africans be most appropriately portrayed: as passive and brutalized victims, revolutionary resistors, stoic survivors? Or is Atlantic slavery, like the Holocaust, trivialized by the very existence of a representational monument? If so, would a more abstract monument alienate the very public for which it was intended? And just what message should such a monument be designed to convey?

Such questions aside, the idea of erecting a new commemorative monument on the occasion of the bicentenary, especially one which does not foreground the contributions of white British abolitionists, hardly seems to have captured the public imagination. There is even, it seems, some resistance to having new inscriptions on established statues and memorials so that their links to slaving interests would be made explicit. Arguments are made that we cannot 'read back into' history, that 'we' should not 'dwell on the past' that 'we' should eschew 'political correctness' and focus instead on the present. The 'we' assumed implicitly dismisses the historical sensibilities of those Londoners today who are themselves the descendants of slaves.

There are, it seems, plans for a statue dedicated to enslaved Africans to be erected in Hyde Park and for a memorial on the same theme to be established in Fen Court in the City of London, but at time of writing, it remains unclear when or whether they will come to fruition.

In 1682, William Godwyn proposed a public statue in London which would prominently and permanently acknowledge the injustice suffered by enslaved Africans under British rule. Today, more than three centuries later, his call has still yet to be answered.

This article began as a series of conference papers and seminar presentations, given at: 'Public Representation and Private Mourning: Commemoration and Memorial', Bristol, 17 March 2002; 'City, Nation, Empire', Museum of London, 8 June 2002; University of Exeter, 22 May 2003; University of the West of England's Regional History Seminar, 26 Jan. 2006; and the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies Annual Conference, Oxford, 2007. I wish to thank the following: Philip Ward Jackson and Jo Darke (Public Monuments and Sculpture Association) for their guidance on London's statues; for information kindly supplied, Davina Thackara, Terry Cavanagh, Jane Riches, Franc Loyd and Ian Leith; for their kind advice also Dr Beth Kowaleski Wallace, Dr Stuart Burch, Professor Anne Laurence, Dr Brycchan Carey and Professor Frank O'Gorman. I am most obliged to staff at the University of Cambridge Library, at the Conway Library of the Courtauld Institute, at the Library and Muniments, Westminster Abbey, the Museum of London and Museum in Dockland. I am also grateful to Dr Peter Fleming, to the editors of History Workshop Journal (especially Professor Catherine Hall), to Wilf Summerbell who read and commented so helpfully on the draft, and to Jinx Newley and Sian White who proofread it. Thanks also to Professor Christine MacLeod, Dr Stuart Burch and Professor Anne Laurence for their kind advice. Any shortcomings are purely my own responsibility.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

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Set in Stone? Statues and Slavery in London

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With these thoughts in mind, it seems fitting to consider how far statues and public memorials in the nation's capital represent Britain's involvement in both transatlantic slavery and its abolition. London was the largest slaving port in late Stuart times, and the City remained the commercial centre of what was, by the Georgian era, the world's premier slaving nation.