Fighting the rising tide of racism

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.