My current
state of health prevented me from attending the demonstration against the visit
of President Trump today, but it didn’t prevent me from thinking about one of
the most important themes raised by the right-wing populism of which Trump is
the most prominent leader.
A recent report
from the Trades Union Congress (Racism
Ruins Lives) underlines the persistence of racism in the workplace, a topic
about which I have
blogged before more than
once.
The reality of
racism is frequently denied – which is why it is important to highlight the
evidence of this reality, in wider society as much as in the workplace.
The Government’s
own Race
Disparity Audit gives official evidence (from 2017) of the continuing scale
of racism in our society and its impact upon people’s lives;
“Asian and Black households and those in
the Other ethnic group were more likely to be poor and were the most likely to
be in persistent poverty. Around 1 in 4 children in households headed by people
from an Asian background or those in the Other ethnic group were in persistent
poverty, as were 1 in 5 children in Black households and 1 in 10 White British
households.”
This disproportionate
experience of poverty depends to some extent upon higher rates of unemployment;
“around 1 in 10 adults from a Black,
Pakistani, Bangladeshi or Mixed background were unemployed compared with 1 in
25 White British people.”
The state –
which we might hope (by virtue of its collection of these statistics) would
recognise an obligation to do something to redress such disadvantage does
itself have something of a disproportionate impact; ”while there has been a very large reduction in the use of Stop and
Search among Black people since 2008/09, the use of these powers remains far
higher on this ethnic group than others. Black men are also almost three and a
half times more likely to be arrested than White men,” and; “of all defendants, including juveniles, who
were remanded at Crown Court for indictable offences, the proportion of
defendants who were remanded in custody (rather than allowed out on bail) was
highest for Black defendants, and particularly for Black males.”
This data is being updated online
– and you can check
there that; “in 2017, the average
(median) hourly pay for White people was £11.34, which was 10p higher than the
average hourly pay for people from all other ethnic groups combined” and that
“between 2012 and 2016, people living in
White households had the lowest rates of persistent low income out of all
ethnic groups, both before and after housing costs were taken into account –
persistent low income is defined as having 60% or less of the median (average)
UK income in at least 3 out of 4 years. The highest rates of persistent low
income were found among people living in Asian and Black households.”
Racism is woven
into our social structure by history, and in particular by the history of the
Atlantic slave trade and of British imperialism, but it isn’t simply some
historical relic, slowly fading away into the past.
Racism fulfils an
important ideological function for the ruling class in the here and now, in
perpetuating divisions within the working class and in providing part of the
(seemingly) material basis for the formulation of national – or even racialised
– identities rooted in the past (Britishness, Englishness and the so-called “white
working class”) which are a reactionary alternative to socialist ideas.
Far from fading
away into the past, there is evidence of a continuing
rise in racism in the past couple of years following the spike
in racist hate crime after the 2016 Referendum.
The vote for
Brexit was – in part – an expression of this racism, as is the recent emergence
of the Brexit Party. However, these surface phenomena are simply the latest
manifestations of the deeper social roots of racism, the answer to which is a
socialism which must be consistently anti-racist in word and deed.
Socialism today
has to be in opposition to nationalism. We have to follow through from
condemning the Tories “hostile environment” for migrants towards a principled
position of opposition to all racist controls on migration (and all controls on
migration are racist). The role of socialists is to try to unite our class, and
we can only overcome the deep rifts in our class caused by racism by starting
from a position of anti-racism.
A small step in
the right direction locally was the adoption, by the local Labour Party in
Brighton and Hove of specific
pledges to ethnic minority citizens in the City, drawn up at the initiative
of Black and ethnic minority Party members.
Since none are
so fit to break the chains as those who bear them, it is always right, in
struggling against any particular form of oppression to support, first of all,
the self-organisation of those who experience that oppression and who therefore
unavoidably lead the struggle against that oppression.
However,
support for self-organisation doesn’t justify “outsourcing” struggles against
oppression to the oppressed. Racism is, fundamentally a white problem, to do
with the conduct of white people in a racist (and patriarchal) capitalist
society (which is why the pledges developed by Black Party members must now be
implemented by the Party as a whole, including the Labour Group).
Equally, an
understanding of the leading role of those with experience of oppression in the
fight against that oppression does not absolve those of us not oppressed from
our own obligation to understand the world and how to act within it. Racism is
a central part of our contemporary capitalism, and the changing way in which it
is reproduced by, and sustains the social order is something which we need
continually to try to understand, as we try, continually, to change it.
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