Racism in a divided country

True Colours by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (IPPR), Cool Britannia may be a colourful place, but people of colour do not have much of a place in Britain. Racism is institutionalised not just in the police force, as the Lawrence Inquiry revealed last week, but in British society itself. Inequality and exclusion persist at every level.

Harassment of Black and Asian Britons is common place. 'Islamophobia', increasingly anti-virulent anti-Muslim attitudes, is widespread in the media. Even good old anti-Semitism is thriving.

Alibhai-Brown's study of 'public attitudes to multiculturalism' does not make comfortable reading. But the results of her survey of public opinion are hardly news. In trying to show that British society is endemically racist, she only re-confirms the reality that many Asians and Blacks live through everyday. Her real accomplishment is the exposition of contradictions at the heart of New Labour's race and immigration policies; and the redefinition she offers of nationhood and multiculturalism. New Labour has unwittingly followed the old Conservative line of combining the issue of race with questions of immigration. This not only leads to the use of immigration, and the problem of 'bogus' asylum seekers, to appease racism but has also produced a number of double binds for the government. How does the political leadership give messages of inclusion to ethnic minorities while still playing the anti-immigrant card to retain popular white support? How do you alleviate fears of immigration while trying to value the contributions of immigrants and their descendants to British society? Progress towards multiculturalism is not possible, argues Alibhai- Brown, without discarding the assumption that good race relations depend on tough immigration policies. Moreover, multiculturalism has been associated solely with non- white Britons. It is largely the preserve of the immigrants and as such has remained at the margins. Alibhai-Brown wants to bring multiculturalism into the centre and insists that it should apply to the whole of society. We need a new, inclusive description of British identity. Pride in one's chosen ethnic identities should not be limited to Indian, Pakistanis and Caribbeans, but the Welsh, Scots and Irish too should be "allowed to feel pride in their ethnic and religious identity". Thus, the whole discourse of identity and race has to be placed within the context of the devolved United Kingdom and a new British nation. While this is highly original material, it does have its problems. For example, the whole notion of 'ethnic identity' that Alibhai- Brown wishes to extend to the white tribes of Britain is seriously flawed. The term 'ethnicity' has its roots in the North American milieu where, apart from white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, all other communities have traditionally been considered as 'ethnics'. It connotes the primordially constituted 'Other' as an 'outsider'. Thus, by definition, ethnic identity is exclusive. The Scots, Welsh and the Irish can only acquire ethnic identities by considering themselves outside the dominant English culture, or by demonising the English. Ethnicity is the root to the ghetto and rampant fragmentation. It has no place in a cohesive multicultural society where all cultures are supposed to be equal. The new British identity, therefore, has to be based on something greater than ethnicity. Something that produces pride in one's distinctive culture as well as confidence in being an integral, and interlocking, part of the totality of cultures in Britain. That something, as Alibahi-Brown hints, is history. Britain does not have one but many histories, a point totally lost on New Labour. "Consider a thousand years of British history and what does it tell us," Blair asked at a recent Labour conference. His answer: "An empire, the largest empire the world has ever known." This sort of nonsense is hardly likely to go down well with Black and Asian Britons. But it also does injustice to Scot, Welsh and Irish histories. There are however equally important Jewish and Muslim histories of Britain. The Muslims, for example, did not arrive here, as conventionally believed, with the 1950s wave of immigration. They have been here since the 16th century. Indeed without the Muslims, much of what we glorify in British history would not have taken place. Where would the Scottish Enlightenment be without the massive input from Muslim philosophy, thought and learning in the fifteenth, sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries? The common assumption is that liberal secularism is the only guarantee of pluralism and freedom in a democratic society. But when liberal secularism is turned into a yardstick for judging everything it becomes an ideology that undermines all notions of multiculturalism. For example, the classical, liberal notions of 'freedom', all the way from Mill to Rawls, do not have a place for the marginalised and the poor. My theoretical swipes should not distract from the sheer passion and bold insights of Alibahi-Brown's study. If New Labour adopts its 'new strategy' for shaping a multicultural Britain, we would go a long way indeed.

Copyright 1999
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