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Showing posts with label Racism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Racism. Show all posts
Gearóid Ó Loingsigh ☭ writing in Socialist Democracy 

Beyoncé, Cowboy Carter (2024)

Beyoncé was back in the news once again for a spot of cultural appropriation. It was not her first brush with cultural Neanderthals, she has been here before for apparently “stealing” Egyptian culture by dressing as Nefertiti. Added into the mix was a lesser-known black artist, Kaitlyn Sardin, who excels at Irish dancing and dared produce some fusion dance routines.

I have dealt with Beyoncé and Rihanna wading into the murky cesspit of the cultural appropriation debate in the past when they were accused of appropriating Egyptian culture(1) and won’t deal with it here. This time though, the debate is clearly about music, produced by people who are still around and not the attire of long dead Egyptians with little connection to the modern country. The fact that white country music fans are still around to complain, doesn’t make the debate any less sterile or ridiculous.

Beyoncé’s faux pas was apparently to record a country & western album titled Cowboy Carter. Apparently, some were of the view that a black artist shouldn’t record a “white” song or perform in a “white” musical genre. Her first release from the album was a song she composed, Texas Hold ‘Em.(2) And the hounds of hell were let loose to howl and drown out the music. Some radio stations refused to play the song, though that didn’t stop it going to No.1 in the country music charts and the debate, though debate might be too fine a word to put on it, erupted. She is not white, she is not part of the country music scene and she should stay in her lane, is a crude but accurate summary of most of those criticising her. 

She is actually from Houston, Texas, not that it matters. One person interviewed by The Guardian responded that “It doesn’t matter that you came from Texas. It matters if you’re actually living a country lifestyle. It bothers me that her song is being called country.”(3) These words might be familiar to some. They are normally advanced by identitarians when talking about whites playing genres considered “black” and in some cases other non-whites have levelled this accusation against a whole array of non-white artists including Beyoncé. It is reactionary rubbish with the racism, in this case, hiding just under the surface, behind a veil of cultural purity. One even went as far as to say that he would bet that Beyoncé had never been in the country saloon he was being interviewed in. Well, many black women would steer clear of such venues, for more than obvious reasons.

Cultures are not pure, ever. None. Not now, not ever, not even going back to the stone age. I am very sure, no stone age hunter armed with a flintstone hatchet ever shouted “You’re appropriating my culture” when he realised some other village had come up with the same invention, or even just “stole” the idea.

Country music is not pure either and to the shock and horror of many a man yearning for the days he ran around in his white bedsheets, it isn’t even that white. Blacks have made significant contributions to country music, not least the musical instrument known as the Banjo. What would country be without the banjo? Rhiannon Giddens, the black musician has dedicated her time to reviving the banjo as a black instrument and recording some excellent music, though unsurprisingly she doesn’t quite stick to genres either.(4) Her site describes her thus:

Singer, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and impresario, Rhiannon draws from many musical traditions including blues, jazz, folk, hiphop, African, Celtic, classical, and jug band. She bridges contemporary and traditional forms, and few musicians have done more to revitalize old-time influences in current music.(5)
Rhiannon Giddens

She composes her own songs, covers others, even ones such as Wayfaring Stranger, recorded by many white country artists, though actually written and composed by two Germans in the 1660s. As far removed from her as from the whites who might like to claim the song as their own (Links below to Gidden’s version,(6) Johnny Cash’s(7) the Mormon Tabernacle Choir(8) and even Ed Sheeran’s(9) very uncountry version. I have included links to all songs and routines mentioned in this article). The song belongs to whoever wants to sing it, however they wish to, though I personally think Sheeran murders the song with a flintstone hatchet, but each to their own.

So, Beyoncé is quite entitled to record in whatever style she wants. Part of what rankles some is that she went straight to No.1 and will make a fortune from the album and this is part of the stay in your lane slogan applied to blacks and whites. Elvis made a fortune singing what was essentially considered, at least initially, to be a black musical form and other white artists who have done this have been criticised by a black bourgeoisie who want that slice of the cake for themselves. Some of the whites criticising Beyoncé are undoubtedly racist, some might just be musical purists, though music is one art form that just doesn’t lend itself to purity. Others, like identitarians everywhere, think that the money is theirs. Flip sides of the same coin.

Beyoncé is not the only black artist to venture into the world of country,(10) Charley Pride and Ray Charles did so back in the 1960s at times of heightened tensions in the midst of the racial violence meted out against those demanding civil rights for blacks. When Charley Pride released his first country album, his image was not put on the record sleeve and they initially hid the fact he was black as part of their marketing strategy. He would eventually make it to the Grand Ole Opry in 1967. He had a total of 52 top ten hits on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart.(11) No mean feat and not a once off foray into country music either, he was a country artist. Linda Martell fared worse as she never hid that she was black and though she would also perform at the Grand Ole Opry in 1970, her album Color Me Country(12) never had the same success. Ray Charles also dipped his fingers into the pond producing Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music(13) in 1962. It was a best seller, topping the charts. 

So, Beyoncé is by no means the only or even the first black artist to find success in the genre. Black artists have always ventured into genres that were not considered to be black. Others have gone the other way and identitarians tend to criticise white artists doing “black” music, though when Gene Autry, the white country and western singer, nicknamed the Singing Cowboy recorded a blues album, nobody accused him of cultural appropriation. Though even non-whites get accused by the black bourgeoisie closely aligned to the US Democratic Party of cultural appropriation, Jews, Asians, even Africans get in the neck. Samuel Jackson infamously accused black British actors of stealing their jobs because they were cheaper and questioned the cultural bonafides of British-Nigerian actor David Oyelowo when he was cast as Martin Luther King in the film Selma.(14) He never criticised the decision to cast the black Yank, Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela in the film Invictus or Matt Damon as the white South African rugby captain in the same film. Given the backlash against his comments he decided to keep his mouth shut when the British-Ugandan actor Daniel Kaluuya was chosen to play the black revolutionary leader of the Black Panther Party, Fred Hampton. No one is safe from the accusation. It is a bit like the MacCarthy trials. “Are you now or have you ever been a homosexual? No, but I slept with a man who was. Have you ever appropriated a culture? No, but I hummed a tune by a man who had.”

Which brings us now to Kaitlyn Sardin, the US black Irish dancer. She has recently gone viral, though not for the first time, with her dance routines and not being as powerful as Beyoncé has come in for some vile racist abuse.(15) She produced a new video which is what is now termed fusion i.e. Irish dance with some developments. This is now quite common and there is a host of Irish groups producing fusion. My favourite is a routine called Freedom with the voice of Charles Chaplin and images from Belfast in the early seventies.(16) Though the first person to do this was Michael Flatley with River Dance which not only broke many of the “rules” of Irish dancing, it even went as far as to incorporate the Lambeg War Drums in a much more positive sense than the annual announcement of Protestant supremacy for which they are used every July 12th. Of course, Flatley, unlike Sardin is white and of Irish descent.
Kaitlyn Sardin

As I said there are many fusion groups in Ireland, the one I previously mentioned and even one which is danced to classical music titled Fusion Fighters Perform Fusion Orchestra.(17) Again, all as white as the driven snow in Siberia. There is even an all-female Fusion Fighters group from the USA that does a tap dance routine to William Tell.(18) The particular group started off with Irish dance and moved into other styles over time, so much so that even their website acknowledges it has less to do with Irish dance than they used to.(19) It is what happens with culture. It evolves, all the time. Again, they are white and no one said fusion is not Irish dancing and no one said anything about not being Irish, even though their Irish connections may be as tenuous as Darby O’Gill.

The term fusion is one of those designed to assuage musical purists more than racists. In reality there is no such thing as fusion music. All music and dance are fusion till it becomes accepted as the standard, when new deviations or fusions arrive. Though dancing has existed in Ireland for centuries it has not been immune to outside influences such as French Quadrilles in the 1800s or other forms. The clues are in the names, hornpipes and polkas for example are two types of music that you will find in other parts of Europe and indeed in the case of polkas they clearly originated in Eastern Europe, though most forms including reels and jigs are not exclusively Irish either. All cultures borrow.

Most instruments used in Irish music are not Irish in origin. Some, like the flute have arisen in most cultures around the world and archaeological remains have thrown up examples everywhere of flutes and whistles made from everything, including animal bones. Fiddles arose over a long process around the world and it is a bit difficult to pinpoint them to one country. Uillean pipes are Irish, though they too were part of a wider process in Europe with different types of pipes arising. Though Scottish bag pipes are perhaps the most famous type of pipe, there are in fact lots of pipes throughout Europe and parts of Africa, Iran, Azerbaijan and even India. Other instruments such as the banjo are African in origin, though the modern banjo has developed over time since it was first brought to the western world by slaves. The piano accordion is a relatively recent European invention from the mid 1800s, a further development of the accordion, which was also a European instrument. If we rejected all outside influences and demanded purity, we would have little in the way of Irish music or dance, were we to have any at all.

So, Kaitlyn Sardin should be celebrated. She is from the US, is black and more importantly is very good at what she does: dancing. The fact that she is not Irish or she recently produced a fusion routine is neither here nor there. Any liberal who got lost on the internet and accidently read this article will probably have nodded most of the way down: until now. The ridiculous statements made about Beyoncé and Sardin are generally rejected by liberals. But when the cultural capitalists hiding behind identity politics make similar claims against white artists or indeed between other non-white artists this rubbish is taken seriously. Culture does not belong to anyone, you don’t have to be white, black, Asian or Latin to perform in a particular style. Culture is a gently flowing river you bathe in, swimming ashore where you please along its route or letting it sweep you out into the sea. It has always been thus and always will be, despite the attempts of cultural capitalists to appropriate culture for their own grubby money-making ends, or racists imagining some non-existent purity. It doesn’t mean that some of the commercial outings by Beyoncé and other artists do it well. They don’t. Beyoncé was criticised for her depiction of India as a white paradise and other artists such as Gwen Stefani, Nicki Minaj and Iggy Azalea have been accused of engaging in crass portrayals of the cultures they seek to borrow from(20) and in Ireland we know a thing or two about how crass Hollywood can be when it comes to depicting Irish music. But that is another matter, many artists in particular genres have come up with really crass portrayals of their own cultures. The point is whether culture is pure, has lanes and you stick to them due to an accident or birth.

The legendary US folk singer Pete Seeger would joke that plagiarism was the basis of all culture and he was a wonderful plagiarist who introduced musical forms from around the world to a US audience at a time when there was no internet and it was not an easy feat. He introduced the song Wimoweh to the world, which has gone through multiple adaptations,(21) some of them very good and others absolutely dire, such as that recorded by the English pop group Tight Fit in the 1980s.(22) The original song however was quite different in style and written and recorded by the South African musician Solomon Linda(23) who was swindled out of the royalties on the song. Had Seeger stayed in his lane, most of us would never have ever heard of Linda or the story behind his song.

Demands for cultural purity are inherently reactionary, as are demands to stay in your lane, be they levelled by whites, blacks or Asians. Culture is to be celebrated and expanded. The accusation of appropriation would only make sense if someone like Seeger had said he wrote Wimoweh, that would be straightforward dishonesty, something he could never be accused of in his multiple adaptations of songs from Ireland, Japan, China, Indonesia, Scotland, Chile, Nicaragua amongst other places.

Beyoncé’s foray into country is perfectly fine, though personally, I don’t like her music, including her country. But that is my personal taste and has nothing to do with appropriation or other rubbish from cultural capitalists. The Irish radio on Saturday’s used to broadcast an Irish music show from the musical company Walton’s. It always finished off saying “If you do feel like singing a song, do sing an Irish one.” The exhortation was for all, not some, the point was to celebrate and enjoy music. Lets leave the cultural capitalists, purists, identitarians and racists to the handful of songs they mistakenly believe to be pure.

Notes

(1) See Ó Loingsigh, G. (02/05/2020) Cultural Appropriation: A Reactionary Debate. 

(2) See Beyoncé’s version here.

(3) The Guardian (04/03/2024) I can guarantee Beyoncé has never stepped foot in here: Houston’s country saloons review Texas Hold ‘Em. Diana Gachman.

(4) See for example Another Wasted Life.

(14) The Guardian (08/03/2017) Samuel L Jackson criticises casting of black British actors in American films. Gwilym Mumford. 

(15) Irish Central (25/03/2024) Irish dancer’s fusion choreography goes viral, triggers racists. Kerry O’Shea 

(16) See. 

(17) See.

(18) See.

(19) See.

(20) Business Insider (14/01/2023) Gwen Stefani is only the latest glaring example of cultural appropriation in pop music. Callie Ahlgrim. 
(21) See.

(22) See.

(23) See.

⏩ Gearóid Ó Loingsigh is a political and human rights activist with extensive experience in Latin America.

Beyoncé, Irish Dancing And The Nonsense Of Cultural Appropriation

Carrie Twomey 🎤 speaking on LMFM.

“Racism is not the answer” says Drogheda resident Carrie Twomey McIntyre.

She joined Michael Reade to discuss the D Hotel being turned into accommodation for International Protection Applicants.


Racism Is Not The Answer


⏩Carrie Twomey hates Illinois Nazis (just like the Blues Brothers)

Racism Is Not The Answer

Caoimhin O’Muraile ☭ Not so many years ago racism in sport, particularly football and, to a lesser extent cricket, was rampant. 

Gangs of racist thugs inhabited the terraces of football grounds like Stamford Bridge, home of Chelsea FC, Elland Road, Leeds United’s home ground, and the Bolyn Ground (Upton Park), home of West Ham United. When the English cricket team were playing some of these morons began attending their matches. It must be stressed that none of the football clubs or the England cricket team condoned in any way these people’s actions and chants. Chelsea fans, or an element of them, had and to my knowledge still have connections with the Nazi group Combat 18 (C18) with links to six county loyalists. 

During the late seventies and eighties, the National Front (NF) and later the British National Party (BNP) gained support at Leeds and West Ham. There was a point at Elland Road when if a young black player, Terry Connor, scored a goal giving Leeds United a 1-0 win a tiny element of their fans would claim the game was 0-0 rather than give a black player any credit! 

In recent years and due to Chelsea's success, much of it attributed to black players the racist element in their fan base has been quiet. Some West Ham supporters changed the tune to their anthem; ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’ to the air of the German national anthem while, at the same time sporting a Nazi salute. All this was open racism and support for fascism on the terraces and the three clubs mentioned were by no means the only ones affected by this cancer. 

At Old Trafford, home of Manchester United, elements of racists began chanting. I remember it well, especially when we were playing West Bromwich Albion who had a few black players and they were brilliant players, I have to admit, even though they played for the opposition. Fortunately, there was also a strong Anti-Fascist Action (AFA) presence at the ground which combatted these extreme right-wing activists, most of whom did not have a clue as to what ‘right-wing’ in its political sense meant. There was a world of difference between attacking a player because he was a wanker, as all opposition players were in our eyes at that time, and attacking a player on the grounds of skin colour. Those days have to a large extent gone and as much as I look back through rose tinted glasses to the glorious days of the seventies and eighties there was also an ugly side.

Today, in what passes for the modern game at top flight level (something I question as to whether it is actually football or not) racism comes not so much from the seats, which replaced terracing, but from another quarter and is quite cleverly masked. Recently at Manchester United a gifted young player, potential great, Mason Greenwood had allegations of ‘assault, attempted rape and coercive control’ made against him. One of the alleged incidents took place at a party he and his partner, Harriet Robson, were attending. Footage was taken of Mason physically assaulting Harriet who then, supported by ‘friends’ made the allegations. It must have been one of these ‘friends’ who took the footage. Harriet, and her ‘friends’, immediately dropped the allegations against Mason and refused any further cooperation with the police inquiry which was subsequently dropped. Mason Greenwood was never charged with any offence and pleaded his innocence all the way, yet his employer, Manchester United, chose to terminate his services at the club. This amounted essentially to sacking him for something which occurred at a party involving himself and his partner which came to nothing outside the narrow mentality of a few. The couple are now back together happily bringing up their newly born baby in Spain. 

The verbal attacks on Greenwood outside the club were spearheaded by groups and individuals holding ‘radical feminist’ views. This strand of ‘feminism’ should not be confused with the other major variants which are ‘orthodox or liberal feminism’ and ‘Marxist feminism’. Radical feminism has little to do with women’s equality, something every socialist, male and female, should consider themselves a supporter of, but it is more about female domination. Radical feminism in all its degrees is primarily anti-male. In the case of Mason Greenwood, it could also be considered ‘racist’. Manchester United unfortunately, but not surprisingly, bowed to these female Hitlers and their servile male supporters. Some men consider it a badge of honour to be dominated by their female partners, and the club essentially sacked Mason Greenwood. They then went out and spent a fortune on a forward, Rasmus Hojlund who, I believe, will be a very good asset to the team but that is not the point. The point is the club, if that is what it still is, bowed to the pressure spearheaded by these radicals like celebrity Rachel Riley. She said’ “if Mason Greenwood played again for United” she would stop supporting them. Well, as far as I’m concerned you and your middle-class radicals can fuck off and don’t’ come back - oh and take your servile male fans with you. 

I notice these ‘radical feminists’ are deafening by their silence when it comes to real exploitation of women working in sweatshops for a pittance of a wage. No publicity in such campaigns perhaps! Feminism is about women’s equality, equality at work, equal pay for equal work with males and equality in the home and equal political representation along with equality of opportunities generally and an end to violence against women. These demands should be supported by every socialist and trade unionist in fact all decent people. The campaign launched against Mason Greenwood was disgusting and racist in my view. Mason is now playing his football in Spain for Getafe, a Madrid based club, where he is making an early impact. I for one wish him and Harriet with their new baby all the best and every success.

Why were the attacks on Mason Greenwood racist or could be construed as racist? Well, let’s come forward a few weeks to the case of another Man United player, the Brazilian international winger Antony. He had allegations made against him by his former partner, Gabriela Cavallin, and two other women. These allegations of abuse and violence by the women have not been withdrawn, unlike those against Mason Greenwood which were withdrawn almost immediately! Despite investigations against the player by police in Greater Manchester and Brazilian police being ongoing Antony is back training with his teammates. Despite his former partner urging the club to suspend him he has been afforded favourable treatment, unlike Mason Greenwood. In a statement Manchester United said:

As Antony's employer, Manchester United has decided that he will resume training at Carrington, and be available for selection, while police inquiries proceed. This will be kept under review pending further developments in the case. As a club, we condemn acts of violence and abuse. We recognise the importance of safeguarding all those involved in this situation and acknowledge the impact these allegations have on survivors of abuse.

Antony, a winger, cost £82 million to buy from Ajax and he is a prized asset. He is considered white,  certainly not black, and is headline material at superstar level with 16 caps for Brazil. Mason Greenwood did not cost such a colossal fee and has been with the club since he was seven years of age, a credit, along with Marcus Rashford to United’s academy. For me, Mason Greenwood is worth ten Antonys but that is not the point. The fact that this superstar has been given beneficial treatment by his employer than was Mason Greenwood is concerning to say the least and it does have more than an air of racism about it in my view. Given the fact ‘radical feminists’ tend to come from middle-class backgrounds, though not exclusively, the masked racist content from them comes as no great surprise.

The statement on Antony was in sharp contrast with the club statement about Mason Greenwood, which said after a six-month long process investigating the player: 

The club mutually agreed with Greenwood that it would be most appropriate for him to recommence his carrier away from Old Trafford.

I seriously question how much mutuality there was in this decision? The treatment of the two players is in sharp contrast. It has also been noticeable how, once again deafening by their silence these ‘radical feminist’ groups and individuals have been during the Antony affair. For me, there is much more evidence to suggest guilt on the part of Antony than there ever was against Greenwood. Mason Greenwood was hung out to dry by a bunch of ‘femi-fascists’ as some, not inaccurately, call them who were supported in this crime by Manchester United, the club a young seven- year-old kid gave his childhood for in the hope of making it big one day. That day was not, and hopefully will not be far away Mason.

Where have the Professional Footballers Association (PFA) been during the Greenwood affair? In sharp contrast to that of Antony they were nowhere to be seen or heard during the six traumatic months the club privately investigated Mason Greenwood. They were, however, at Old Trafford the following day in the case of Antony! Could this be because Antony cost £82 million and is considered a white Brazilian of Portuguese extraction superstar international? An expensive asset to both his club and country! Mason Greenwood, a black working-class youngster needed protection, he was only 19, and representation from his union was essential, where were they?

Now to another case of silence by the ‘radical feminists’, that of three Irish International Rugby Union players, Paddy Jackson and Stuart Olding. These two - in the dock with another rugby player, Blane McIlroy who was found not guilty of exposure - were charged with assault and rape. These three international rugby players were found not guilty of rape, assault and exposure despite much evidence to suggest the opposite. The victim herself gave a tearful account of events which occurred, again at a party, describing how she was brutally raped by the two rugby stars. They were found not guilty by a court of law but was that the correct verdict? Or was it a miscarriage of justice? Such verdicts, despite overwhelming evidence are not unusual when it comes to defendants coming from the bourgeois strata of society, the middle-classes. A case of the rich looking after their own perhaps? The question here must again be asked; where have the voices of women’s defence been? Where have the middle-class led ‘radical feminist’ groups and individuals been, where were they during the Jackson, McIlroy and Olding case? They had plenty to say about Mason Greenwood!

Manchester United have been at very best guilty of double standards in the cases of Mason Greenwood and Antony. Preferential treatment has been given to the £82 million pound player compared to that meted out to one of their graduate players, one potentially far better than the one footed Antony. There is more than an air of racism involved in these cases and the class question enters the fold when we broaden the situation out to include players from other sports like Rugby Union. ‘Radical feminism’ spearheaded the assault, racist assault in my view, by a bunch of middle-class man hating women, against Mason Greenwood while the same gobshites, male and female alike, have been conspicuously silent over Antony and the two rugby internationals. Another sickening example of class and racial hypocritical, double standards, in sport at the highest level. Fucking sickening to say the least.

The case of Mason Greenwood can only be construed as racist given the double standards of the club and character assassination of the player by ‘radical feminists.’ A question could be asked, how many other clubs practice such discrimination? Let us take a hypothetical situation; let’s say a man and a woman had allegations made against them and the man was virtually let off while the woman was sentenced. The ‘radical feminists’ for once would have an argument over discrimination against the woman, if they could be found. That would depend very much on where abouts on the so-called social ladder the hypothetical allegations took place. The radicals are seldom seen at the cutting edge of women’s abuse, in the sweatshops, at the ports where migrant women are abused, on the council estates where violence against women is not uncommon. No publicity for these self-publicists in such situations and venues no doubt!! Of course, if these arguments were to be pointed out to either Manchester United or the trail blazers of the ‘radical feminists’ they would try and rubbish them, that is for sure!!

Caoimhin O’Muraile is Independent Socialist Republican and Marxist.

Clandestine Racism in Sport and Radical Feminism!

Barry Gilheany ✍ Part 2 of a duplet on racism. 

Crucial to the unpacking of the assumptions articulated in Diane Abbott’s letter and to the creation and maintenance of genuine antiracist solidarity, is an examination of how “white” identity was invented.

 For by the end of the 19th century with the reality of race having been firmly established, the question of who was white was deeply contested. Then, in the space of a few decades at the turn of the 20th century, “whiteness” as is now commonly understood became consolidated as much out of fear as out of self-regard.[1]

The outworking of racial categorisation begins with the trans-Atlantic slave trade. While the institution of slavery reaches back into the ancient world and was strongly embedded in most cultures and civilisations, the mode of slavery introduced to the Americas differed fundamentally from that pertaining in the premodern world. First, the industrial scale of plantation slavery required unprecedented numbers of slaves and a new and horrific degree of brutality. With their previous supply of Balkan and Circassian slaves cut off by the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, European slave traders turned to sub-Saharan Africa (as the Islamic Empire had done) as their source of human chattel. Christian Europe’s slaves became almost entirely Black African as were slaves transported to plantations in the Americas. 

As Black slaves became the predominant labour force on New World plantations, it helped cement the categories of racial division as new arguments about the inferiority of Black Africans became entrenched in colonial communities. New laws created clearer distinctions between slaves and servants; black people and whites with laws in Virginia banning miscegenation and allowing property of backs to be expropriated and sold with the profits used to support poor whites. Beyond the pragmatic reasoning that slaves were cheaper and easier to control, the racialisation of slavery provided ideological justification for the acceptance of servitude in a society that proclaimed its loyalty to freedom and liberty.[2]

From the early days of the Republic to the 20th century only one group was deemed unconditionally as white – “Anglo-Saxons”. Who else belonged to the category was a matter of social negotiation. Doubts as to who could be white were there from the inception of the United States. In the view of Benjamin Franklin, the number of “purely white People in the World” was tiny: “All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny … And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians, and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also. Only “the Saxons” and “the English” were truly white. “I could wish their Numbers were increased,” lamented Franklin.[3]

A century and a quarter later, in 1911, the Dillingham Commission set up by the US Congress to investigate the state of immigration at a time of mass panic about the about the quality of European immigrants, in its report noted that the Bureau of Immigration “recognises 45 races or peoples among immigrants coming to the United States, and of these 36 are indigenous to Europe. It also noted Blumenbach’s “five great divisions of mankind” but broke down the “Aryan stock” (which it took as synonymous with “Caucasian”) into these distinct races – Teutonic, Slavonic, Italic, Hellenic, Lettic, Celtic, Illyric, Armenic and Indo-Iranic.[4]

The first group to pose the whiteness test for the American elite were the Irish. In the early decades of the 19th century, Irish immigrants were frequently referred to as “niggers turned inside out” and Black people as “smoked Irish”. The Irish were seen not just as socially and culturally, but also as physically distinct, “low-browed,” “brutish,” and even “simian.” To see white chimpanzees is dreadful,” the English historian and clergyman Charles Kingsley observed of Ireland.[5]

The British anthropologist John Beddoe, referred to earlier, created an “Index of Nigrescence” which supposedly quantified the degree of blackness in a population. He created a racial map which showed that the Irish, the Welsh and the Highland Scots were more “Africanoid” than the English. There were, he thought, traces of the “Mongoloid” among the Welsh, while the Irish were close to Cro-Magnons, a prehistoric ancestor of modern Europeans. However, in time, the Irish in America began to acquire their whiteness status partly because of their influence as a group (as in the legendary Tammany Hall Democrat political machine) partly also through their role in the enforcement of workplace colour bars against blacks (as portrayed in the film The Gangs of New York) [6]

Through such transatlantic faux scholarship and bureaucratic methodology, his histories of whiteness developed. For Europeans, sketching out the numerous races of the continent was an aid to nation-building and a means of explaining social divisions within and between nations. For Americans, it enabled a myth of ancestry and a legitimising narrative for their revolutionary story of freedom despite the millions enslaved and the majority denied suffrage. It also became a means of evaluating immigration and of policing relations between migrant groups.[7]

However, the popularisation and enthusiastic embrace of whiteness and white superiority by elites and common folk on both sides of the Atlantic went alongside fears about the future and security of the white race. The supposed phenomenon of wantonness of an increasingly racialised lower classes and fears of racial degeneration were widely disseminated in academic and popular discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. Immigration from highly fecund Southern European groups conjured up fears of “race suicide” popularised by Theodore Roosevelt who became US President in 1901. He believed that the elimination by whites of inferior races was a moral good “for the benefit of civilisation.” He believed that for a race to succeed in “the warfare of the cradle,” it had to consist “of good breeders as well as of good fighters. Thus, wilful childlessness was a “sin for which the penalty is ... race death; a sin for which there is no atonement.” [8]

Married to the fear of race suicide were eugenic concerns about the quality of white or Anglo-Saxon stock. The promotion of eugenics is primarily associated with the polymath Francis Galton. Eugenics was “the science that deals with all influences to improve the inborn qualities of a race,” a programme for racial improvement through selective breeding. So as to ensure that in the words of the American lawyer and eugenicist Madison Grant, author of the 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race, one of the most influential work of American scientific racism, “He can breed from the best, or he can eliminate the waste”, 65,000 people were forcibly sterilised in the forty years after the Supreme Court had upheld the first eugenical sterilisation law passed by Virginia to order the sterilisation of Carrie Buck. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough” concluded Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, in summation of the Court’s verdict.[9] 

But yet. White superiority and self-confidence was stalked by primal fears. In Powellian style language, Charles Henry Pearson wrote forebodingly in his 1893 book National Life and Character that:

The day will come, and perhaps it is not far distant when the European observer will … see the globe girdled with a continuous zone of black and yellow races, no longer too weak for aggression or under tutelage, but independent.

And whites … would be:

elbowed and hustled, and perhaps even thrust aside by peoples whom we looked down as servile and thought of as bound always to minister to our needs.[10]

Such apocalyptic fears fuelled the immigration panic in the US which led to a series of legal restrictions, culminating in the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, which banned all immigration from Asia and set quotas for European migrants based on the proportion of the American population already from a particular country.[11] Of course this was a global phenomenon as well, particularly in Britain’s “White Dominions”. Australia inaugurated its White Australia policy in 1901 with the passage of the Immigration Restriction Act. It was soon followed by Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. The mother country, of course, followed suit with the Aliens Act, 1905. Such immigration laws represented segregation on a large scale. It aims was to create a global version of Jim Crow laws.[12]

The Dead Ends of Racial Nomenclature

It is important to deconstruct “whiteness” and “white identity” because, by extension, all racial categories are artificial creations and, if antiracists are to avoid working in silos, it is of the utmost necessity to avoid falling into the essentialising traps that racial categories create. Racial categorisation has facilitated the emergence of competitive antiracism and hierarchies of oppression and the diversion of much discursive energy into the cul-de-sac of identity politics. At the heart of Diane Abbott’s letter is a failure to fully appreciate the dynamics of race formation how groups who do not have a “Black” or “Brown” skin colour such as Irish or European immigrants and Roma/Gypsy/Travellers were nevertheless abused in simian style ways. Two elements of Critical Race Theory therefore have to be challenged and removed from the repertoire of antiracism: White Privilege and White Fragility.

The problem of racism is primarily social and structural – the laws, practices and institutions that maintain discrimination. The stress on “white privilege” turns a social issue into a matter of personal and group psychology. Decrying white people in the manner of Chicago Tribune columnist Dahleen Glanton “White people, you are the problem” and public declarations of mea culpa as that by the US-based British writer Laurie Penny who insists “ For White people acknowledging the reality of racism means acknowledging our own guilt and complicity”, distorts actually helps keep discriminatory power structures untouched. Yes, African American people are more likely to be arrested and incarcerated for longer periods than white people in the US and have experienced well publicised brutality and homicidal treatment from police. But some analyses suggest that the best predictor of police killings is not race, but income levels – the poorer you are, the more likely you are to be killed.[13]

Similarly, the disproportionate impact of the Covid-19 virus on BAME communities has been well documented. But class inequalities are important too – people living in the most deprived areas in England and Wales died from the virus at twice the rate in the least deprived areas. [14]

So, in these contexts, there is no need to set up race and class as differential and competitive casual categories against each other. Minorites of all hues comprise integral parts of the working class and often share similar experiences of state authority. Race and class shape people’s lives in complex, and dare it be said, intersectional ways.[15]

But perhaps the most egregious abuse of the concept of white privilege has been its application to Jews and Jewish experience of the Shoah/Holocaust. In a discussion on ABC’s The View on the removal by a Tennessee school board from the curriculum Maus a graphic novel about the Shoah, Whoopi Goldberg notoriously opined that the Holocaust “is white people doing it to white people, so y’all gonna fight amongst yourselves”; it was “white on white” violence that exposed “man’s inhumanity to man”. Notwithstanding her profound apology in the wake of the ensuing outcry, what was disturbing from an antiracist viewpoint, was her ignorance about the historical use of racial categories. For race has never simply been about black and white. It’s a concept that has been used to deem certain people biologically incapable or unworthy of being equal. As we have seen, over the past two decades, not just Black and Jewish people, but Irish, Slavs, even the working class have, at various times, been viewed as racially distinct and inferior.

In relation Nazi Germany and the Jews, Goldberg’s comments demonstrate a stunning lack of awareness of the influence of US racist law on Nazi racial policy. The 1935 Nuremberg laws that established that a “citizen is exclusively a national of German blood”, that Jews were not of “German blood” and that marriages and “extramarital intercourse” were forbidden between Jews and citizens of German or racially related blood were directly influenced by the American “one-drop rule” – the belief that one drop of black blood made you “unwhite”.

Critical Whiteness and Jews

The case of the Jews among the whites illuminates the methodological problems of Critical Whiteness Studies and the discourse it is embedded in, not least on the concept of “whiteness” as such. It reveals a political problem, namely the disturbing presence of Jews in the arena of ethnic minorities as well as the presence of antisemitism in its multifarious manifestations.[16]

Over the past twenty years, it has become fashionable and even mainstream in American race scholarship to assert that Jews are white; that they belong to the dominant majority. This means, that as a collective, due to embedded racialised structures in society, they benefit from their dominant position and are complicit in oppression while, in a somewhat twisted manner, they are sometimes taken to be complicit in oppression also as individuals.[17]

The “whiteness” of Jews has, in the US at any rate been defined in two polar opposite ways. From the first, descriptive or interpretive, perspective, the question posed is whether Jews are still considered part of the nation; are they still “aliens” corrupting white America. This was definitely the stance of white supremacists and nativists throughout American history and which, through the emergence of the Alt Right under the Trump Presidency, may be gaining currency again.[18]

The second, critical, view, tries to establish that Jews, at least Ashkenazi Jews who make up the majority of American Jewry are unquestionably white, as they enjoy a. stable place in the white majority. This stable attribution of “whiteness” is problematic as it reflects an intention to show that Jews, despite their former status, as an ethnic and religious minority have come to occupy powerful and dominant positions in society and now belong to the oppressive white power structure. On this reading, Jews realise the curse of all promises: they enter into the world of the multicultural and become successful within it. Thus, they become the new “establishment” when, by the 1960s, other groups in the Western world begin to seek their multicultural space. The trajectory of the image of Israel from the embattled, overwhelmed, rescued fragment of European Jewry to “Super-Jew” and then the “racist” archvillain parallels this cultural tale.[19]

This image of Jewish whiteness is often reinforced by the conception of “intersectionality,” which formulates the interconnectedness of all dominated positions and the experiences of oppressed groups, and which thereby links Israel to Jewish whiteness and domination. In this kind of discourse, the U.S. represents an empire of interlinked systems of white supremacy, imperialism, capitalism and patriarchy, and Jews can be presented as white dominators in the Middle East, colonising indigenous non-white Arab population. It must be emphasised though that critiquing this racialised view of the Israel/Palestine conflict does not amount to a defence of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank; the oppressive controls exercised over the Palestinian Arab population in that Iron Cage or the blockade of Gaza. Its criticism of the introduction of a colour line into conflicts that relate neither to American race relations nor with European Scramble for Africa type of colonialism.[20]

Critical Whiteness and Intersectionality also seek to relegate antisemitism to the background or to the embers of history as it would dilute the criticism conducted in favour of the “really oppressed.” This discursive imperative is explicitly articulated by the leading figure of “intersectional feminism,” Linda Sarsour. Speaking in a video published by the antizionist Jewish Voice for Peace group, she said in terms not dissimilar to that by Diane Abbott:

I want to make the distinction that while anti-Semitism is something that impacts Jewish American than anti-Black racism or Islamophobia because it’s not systemic ... Of course, you may experience vandalism or an attack on a synagogue, or maybe on an individual level … but it it’s not systematic and we need to make that distinction.[21]

So for Linda Sarsour, antisemitism is not a collective or structural phenomenon, but the sum of individual acts and, of more import, antisemitic attacks carried out by other minorities (which is often the case especially at times of conflict and high tension in Israel/Palestine) cannot be significant, for they are not perpetrated by dominant (white groups), who determine the permanence of structural racism.[22]

So, for its polemicism on “colour blind” racism is utterly blind to the nature of antisemitism which unlike racism, which was birthed in modern times by 19th century pseudo-science, is a conspiracy theory which like all conspiracy theories conjure up a demonic elite oppressing and exploiting the common people. Consciously or unconsciously, by reducing all conflicts and social antagonism to race or a colour line, it reproduces the racial categories created by 19th pseudo-science on which white (or more accurately Anglo-Saxon) domination is built while closing off emancipatory projects based on class or other forms of social solidarity.

The Weakness of White Fragility

An associated construct with Critical Race Theory and/or Critical Whiteness is White Fragility. Popularised by the book of the same name by the sociologist Robin DiAngelo. She defines White Fragility as “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 behaviours such as argumentation, silence and leaving the stress-inducing situation. According to her analysis, white people are all the unconscious beneficiaries of racism. But because they are insulated from this fact, they react defensively when confronted with racial realities. The feelings and behaviours that DiAngelo describes are for her mechanisms that protect white privilege by shutting down discourse and restoring a white racial equilibrium.[23]

In her critique of White Fragility, the social psychologist Valerie Tarico notes the absence of rigorous, statistical hypothesis testing in DiAngelo’s work but that, despite it’s apparent nebulosity and weak research base, the concept has spread widely into the corporate diversity and equality training world, the popular media and college curricula. She acknowledges that the concept of white fragility has resonated with millions of progressive activists and that confronting ugly unacknowledged, unconscious, “shadow” parts of ourselves, can be difficult and painful and can enable personal growth and more listening and engagement.[24]

But yet. Tarico argues that to assess the validity of white fragility as a valid psychological construct the following questions need to be asked: is the pattern of emotions and behaviours that it identifies unique to white people and to conversations about race; is it a single or multi-pronged pattern; do these responses actually function to restore white racial equilibrium and do these patterns change over time? She goes on to cite the Barnum effect whereby if a concept is defined broadly or loosely, it is easy to find examples like a fit. She points out that the Barnum effect relies on the human pattern of confirmatory thinking: our brains identify the parts that match and ignore the rest.[25]

But from a socially emancipatory viewpoint, the biggest drawbacks to white fragility and its parent, CRT, are that its division of the world into tribes of oppressors and oppressed and uniform experiences of benefit and suffering in each respective tribe do not necessarily reflect diversity and complexity in individual lives. Indeed, in critical theory to focus on such invites condemnation for perpetuating racism and sexism. Focus on inter-group differences and power hierarchies rather than on human universals and shared humanity that informs traditional social liberalism further alienates those being asked to concede power. By assigning guilt to white people for being born into the dominant group, CRT operates in much the same way as original sin in Biblical Christianity. Failure to acknowledge progress such as the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement leads to scepticism about factual accuracy and, by extension, about any prospect for racial harmony.[26]

But the greatest defect of all in CRT is the essentialisation of race and racial differences which, unintended or not, is the practical outcome of the doctrines they preach. Ultimately, like its Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-European counterparts, white nationalist or identarian movements, they lead humanity into the cul-de-sac of identity politics by eschewing the possibilities of common emancipatory projects such as the Anti-Apartheid and antiracist struggles of not so yesteryear when “Even though we organised autonomously, we saw our struggles as one”.[27] The essential pessimism and default anti-Enlightenment, perversely Occidentalist positions of CRT discourse and the inter-group conflicts it encourages are aeons away from such common struggle.

[1] Kenan Malik, 2023, p.65. A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity Politics. London; Hurst

[2] Malik, pp.66-70

[3] Ibid, p.71

[4] Ibid, pp.71-72

[5] Ibid, pp.73-74

[6] Ibid, p.74

[7] Ibid, p.73

[8] Malik, pp.76-77

[9] Ibid, pp.77-80

[10] Ibid, pp.92-93

[11] Ibid, p.82

[12] Ibid, p.92

[13] Kenan Malik “‘White Privilege Is a distraction, leaving racism and power untouched.” The Observer,14th June 2020.

[14] Ibid

[15] Ibid.

[16] Balazs Berkovitz (2018) “Critical Whiteness Studies and the “Jewish Problem” “Zeitschrift fur kritische Sozialtheorie und Philosophie pp.86-102

[17] Ibid, pp.90-91

[18] Ibid, p. 87

[19] Ibid, p.87

[20] Ibid, p.88

[21] Ibid, p.89

[22] Ibid, p.89

[23] Valerie Tarico, Racism is Real, but the Concept of White Fragility Could Use a Closer Look. 

[24] Ibid

[26] Ibid

[27] Aditya Chakraborty “Never forget this. – if we fight racism in silos, we can’t win” The Guardian 27th April 2023.

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter. 

“My Experience Of Racism Is Worse Than Yours” ✒ Who Is White? The Construction Of White Identity

Barry Gilheany ✍ Part I – Critical Race Theory and the Fracturing of Antiracist Solidarity.

An article featured in the Observer of 16th April 2023 by the writer Tomiwa Osolade titled “Racism in Britain is not as a Black and White Issue. It is More Complicated than that” in which he highlighted a report on ethnic inequality in Britain which has found that Irish, Jewish, and Roma & Traveller people are amongst the most abused ethnic groups.

 In response to the article veteran Labour MP and life long black antiracist campaigner Diane Abbott wrote to the Observer on 23rd April. She dismissed the hostile experiences faced by Jewish, Irish and Traveller people as mere “prejudice” as opposed to the racism faced by black people[1] Since in her account, no one from these groups had to sit at the back of the racially segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955 where Rosa Parks had refused to sit, they could not claim to have been victims of racism (the not quite unspoken reason being of “white” skin pigmentation.)

To add insult to injury in the eyes of her detractors, Diane Abbott stated that the prejudice that Jews, travelling people and Irish now suffer was little more than that directed at people with ginger hair. This letter drew a storm of protest from Jewish groups especially and led to her suspension from the Parliamentary Labour Party. It has also generated considerable. discussion on how to reframe racism and the struggle against it.

Much of this comment and analysis has focused on the apparent cul-de-sacs that identity politics and critical race theory with its ideological “white privilege” immutability. In the first of two articles dealing with the issues raised by Ms Abbot’s letter, I wish to flesh out in these debates the historical construction of race as a social category and the problematisation of critical race theory.

Before engaging with the substantive issues around this topic, a few words about Diane Abbott’s personal story are in order. First elected to the House of Commons in 1987 as a pioneering Black MP (one of four Black and Asian MPs) she has a formidable reputation, preceding and post ceding her election, as a trail blazing antiracist campaigner and spokesperson. She has suffered more racist abuse (of particularly revolting kinds) and death threats, online and offline than any other MP. As a political ally (and former lover) of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and prominent member of the Socialist Campaign Group of left wing (many would say “hard left”) Labour MPs, she has been an outlier for much of her political career serving as a Public Health Minister in the last Labour Government under Gordon Brown and was elevated to Shadow Home Secretary under Corbyn’s leadership. Her strident advocacy of many left wing causes and media profile has attracted much criticism of the purely political kind. She also suffers from Type II diabetes which has arguably affected her judgement and cognition, most notoriously in a “car-crash” interview with Nick Ferrari on London Broadcasting Channel during the 2017 General Election campaign when she was unable to elaborate on her proposal to recruit 10,000 police officers should she had become Home Secretary.

But to return to her “prejudice v racism” letter, it has to be said that she has form when it comes to making, at the least, clumsy statements on race relations. In 1996, Ms Abbott wrote a column for the Hackney Gazette objecting to the recruitment of Finnish nurses to work in a local hospital. Her arguments for employing local people rather than those from abroad rested on the question of whether “Finnish girls, who may never have met a Black person before, let alone touched one, are best suited to nurse in multicultural Hackney.” She expressed her surprise that “blonde, blue-eyed girls from Finland” had been chosen rather than Caribbean nurses “who know the language and understand British culture and institutions” In the ensuing controversy, she was supported by fellow 1987 BAME entrant to Parliament Tottenham MP Bernie Grant who dismissively asserted that Scandinavians “don’t know black people – they probably don’t know how to take their temperature.”[2]

In the years that have passed since Diane Abbott penned that article and particularly since Brexit and the growing saliency and divisiveness of immigration as a political issue; it is hard not to spot the Faragian style xenophobia coated by antiracism in it. Here is a loudly professed antiracist making the argument that immigrants are un-British; that they do not understand British culture and institutions. The blue-eyed Finnish nurse of 1996 occupied the same position then in Diane Abbott’s conception of Britain as the “values” of those crossing the English channel in small boats deemed to be detrimental to “British values” and “cultural cohesion” are in that of the immigration minister, Robert Jenrick, as he defends the Illegal Migration Bill put forward by his boss, Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, who puts a Trumpian stamp on that claim by asserting that they are given to “heightened levels of criminality” including “drug dealing, exploitation, prostitution”.[3]

Were Diane Abbott to revisit that article would she, as a trenchant critic of the anti-migrant tenor of many Brexiteer arguments, perhaps not recognise the uncomfortable resemblance of the latter to what she said in the former. As an offspring of the Windrush generation, she would surely have been aware of the hostility of many to being treated by Black and Asian medics. She must have heard of the notorious prohibition by many housing landlords in the 1960s: “No Blacks. No Irish. No Dogs.” Whither the difference between racism and prejudice?

The Fracturing of Antiracist Solidarity

Since the early 1980s, antiracist struggles have been transformed from the positive, universalist perspective of unity in common struggle which recognised that different groups such as Afro-Caribbeans, Jews and Irish had different experiences of racism and which was embedded in broader social justice and working class betterment movements to the dissipation of such solidarity into the silos of differing groups who through the dynamics of identitarianism[4] have been sucked into the negativity of zero-sum conflict of communal or tribal interests between one another.

Where once anti-racists saw their mission as combating racism, many now see it as confronting the dominance of “whiteness” which is seen as indistinguishable from racism. This preoccupation with whiteness lies in a sense of pessimism about overcoming racism – a pessimism which is articulated most by the celebrated contemporary African American essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates who in his book Between the World and Me writes mournfully that “The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment.”[5] This ‘eternal present’ vision of “whiteness”, “white power structures” or “white privilege is an outcome of the disintegration of radical struggles and the weakening of labour movements through the globalised hegemony of neo-liberalism which has also generated for racists and nationalists fears for the erasure of “whiteness” and the undoing of “western civilisation” concepts as interchangeable for them as it is for anti-racist pessimists.

To understand the current impasse in antiracist discourse and practice, it is necessary to engage with and question critical race theory and how it reifies identity politics. It is then necessary to deconstruct “whiteness” through revisiting how race and racism has been constructed throughout the history of the Western World by spurious science and philosophy. It is through the process of “othering” and/or in group/out-group formation that racism really develops as opposed to the formulation of essentialist concepts such as “whiteness.”

Critical Race Theory

Critical Race Theory (CRT) theorises and seeks to examine society and culture as they relate to categorisations of race, law, and power. CRT is loosely bound together by two common themes. Firstly, CRT proposes that white supremacy and racial power are maintained over time and that the law especially many be a major agent in this process. Secondly, CRT work has investigated the possibility of transforming the relationship between law and racial power. CRT is a product of postmodern philosophy, it derives from critical theory, a social philosophy that argues that social problems are influenced by societal structures and cultural assumptions than by individual and psychological factors.[6] In other words, CRT places much more emphasis on structural and institutional racism than on individualised and inter-personal forms of racism.

CRT began as a theoretical movement within American law schools in the mid- to late 1980s as a reworking of critical legal studies on race issues. Within the US legal world, CRT has stoked controversy since the 1980s on such issues as: its deviation from the idea of colour blindness; promotion of the use of narrative in legal studies; advocacy of “legal instrumentalism” as opposed to ideal-driven uses of the law; analysis of the US Constitution and existing law as constructed to and perpetuating racial power and encouragement of legal scholars to be partial on the side of promoting racial equality.[7]

Among the major themes in CRT work generally as identified by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic are the following:

🔴Critique of liberalism: CRT scholars advocate a race-conscious approach to transformation rejecting liberal embrace of affirmative action, colour blindness, role modelling or the merit principle.
Storytelling or the use of narrative to disseminate and explore experiences of racial persecution.
Revisionist interpretations of American civil rights law and progress. For example, CRT founders like Derrick Bell argued that civil rights advances for African Americans coincided with the interests of white elitists and Mary L. Dudziak asserted that US civil rights legislation was enacted to gain support for the USA from third world countries in the Cold War with the USSR.

🔴Intersectional theory. How the combination or intersection or race with class, sex, class, national origin plays out in various settings.

🔴White privilege: belief in the plethora of social advantages, benefits and courtesies that accrue from membership of the dominant white race. Examples may include not being followed round in stores as a potential thief by staff or not being avoided in the street at night. To which could be added the question “Where are you really from?”

🔴Microaggression: Belief that small acts or racism, whether consciously or unconsciously perpetrated, and which derive from prejudiced cultural heritage have the power to mar the daily experiences of oppressed individuals. Examples can include that question, unfavourable remarks about Afro hairstyles and the derogatory reference “You lot.”

🔴Structural determinism: exploration of how particular modes of thought or widely shared cultural practice are determinants of significant social outcomes, usually occurring without conscious knowledge. CRT theorists therefore posit that the prevailing system cannot redress certain kinds of wrongs.[8]

There are various sub-groupings within CRT which relate to intersectionality such as Critical Race Feminism (CRF), Hebrew Crit (HebCrit), Latino critical race studies, Asian American critical race studies (AsianCrit), South Asian American critical race studies (DesiCrit) and American Indian critical race studies (TribalCrit). CRT methodology and analytical framework have also been applied to the study of white immigrant groups.

For CRT believers, having white skin pigmentation is reified in property. Whiteness as property means in this account that whiteness is the ultimate property that whites alone can possess. The property functions of whiteness – i.e., rights to disposition; rights to use and enjoyment, reputation, and status property; and the absolute right to exclude – make the American dream more likely and achievable for whites as citizens.[9]

CRT: Defenders and Detractors in this Culture War Front

Since around 2010, CRT has moved from academia into mainstream cultural discourse. It has been popularised in the US by the ideas of Ibrahim X Kendi in How to be an AntiRacist (2019) and Robin DiAngelo in White Fragility (2018) and in the UK by Reni Eddo-Lodge in Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race (2018).

The work of Kendi presents us with two interrelated dichotomies. Firstly, one can only be racist or antiracist. Secondly, one can either support the existence of disparities between races as right and natural or one can attribute them to racist power structures and policies in society and oppose them. He asserts that the” claim of ‘not racist’ neutrality is a mask for racism … the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it – and then dismantle it.”[10]

Robin DiAngelo’s approach to racism is thoroughly postmodern. She believes that white people in the USA and much of Europe including the UK are unavoidably racist because of the ways in which they have been socialised in white supremacist countries. In White Fragility she describes whiteness as a “constellation of processes and practices” consisting of “basic rights, values, beliefs, perspectives and experiences purported to be commonly shared by all, but which are actually only consistently afforded to white people.” For Di Angelo, “whiteness” is a system that whites perpetuate with everything they do. Her central tenet of anti-racism is not ‘Did racism occur?’ but ‘How did racism manifest itself in that situation.’[11]

For Reni Eddo-Lodge ‘for so long the bar of racism has been set by the easily condemnable activity of white extremists and white nationalists.’ [12] Her refusal to talk about race to white people is not directed at all white people, ‘just the vast majority who refuse to accept the legitimacy of structural racism and its symptoms’ For ‘at best, white people have been taught not to mention that people of colour are “different” in case it offends us. They truly believe that the experiences of their life as a result of their skin colour can and should be universal.’[13]

CRT has attracted the ire of right-wing culture warriors on both side of the Atlantic especially in the wave of Black Lives Matters (BLM) protests that exploded across both after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. In the televised debates with Joe Biden prior to the Presidential Election of that year, Donald Trump claimed that critical theory is racist and teaches people that America is a horrible place. In a Presidential memo issued earlier that year which stated: 

[A]ll agencies are directed to begin to identity all contracts or other agency spending relating to any training on “critical race theory”, “white privilege..” and that “employees across the Executive Branch have been required to attend trainings where they are told that “virtually all White people contribute to racism”. The memo described CRT as “propaganda” five times, “divisive” five times, “unAmerican” twice and “anti-American” once. CRT is declared to be “contrary to all we stand for as Americans.”[14]

Defenders of CRT or, more accurately, the moral panic around it, claim that Republicans use it as a catch-all for any discussions of America’s past or present that have the potential to render their base uncomfortable.[15]

Throughout 2020-21, laws claiming to ban CRT from public school curriculums were passed in Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas and were advanced in Arizona, Connecticut, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Ohio New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, and West Virginia. Although palpably unconstitutional, these bills indicate an ominous desire on the American right to revoke speech protections and crush academic freedom,[16] line with the visibly growing authoritarian sentiment in populist, pseudo-democracies like Russia, Hungary, Turkey, Poland, and the Philippines. The wording of bans on the prohibition of “concepts” that “public schools shall not promote” such as “the belief that the United States is a meritocracy is an inherently racist or sexist belief” are so wide as to veto great terrains of discursive space.

In the UK, the moral panic about CRT was imported from the US of Donald Trump via right-wing commentators in the Spectator and Daily Telegraph. Despite scant evidence that CRT and associated concepts were and are widespread in British school curricula, it suddenly became a leitmotif for the government of the then Prime Minister Boris Johnston in the summer of 2020 with BLM protests over the George Floyd murder, the personal experiences by young black people of racism and the visible monuments to Britain’s imperial and slave trading past such as the Colston statue in Bristol. At the end of a six-hour debate in the House of Commons to mark Black History Month, the then equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch, came down “unequivocally against” the CRT concept. She warned “We do not want to see teachers teaching their pupils about white privilege and inherited racial guilt.” She solemnly declared that “Any school which teaches these elements of critical race theory, or which promotes partisan political views such as defunding the police without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views, is breaking the law.”[17]

The previous month, the Culture Secretary, Oliver Dowden, warned museums of possible loss of public funding if they took down statues as a result of pressure from campaigners. The Department of Education informed schools in England that they were not to use materials produced by anti-capitalist groups or teach “victim narratives that are harmful to British society.” In his speech to the Conservative Party conference in October 2020, Boris Johnson accused Labour of being on the side of those who “want to pull statues down, to rewrite the history of our country … to make it look more politically correct.” [18]

Thus the controversy around CRT is less perhaps around its academic and discursive content and more as a symbol of the war against “woke”; a rallying cry against a liberal elite whose values are allegedly being foisted upon an unwilling population and who had prior to the December 2019 General Election has supposedly tried to thwart the will of the people as expressed in the Brexit referendum of June 2016 by frustrating the EU withdrawal process in Parliament and campaigning for a second referendum.

But to discuss CRT and its utility in relation to antiracism and wider anti-discrimination discourse and practice, it is necessary to examine and interrogate how race has been conceptualised and systemically formulated throughout history. This will be the subject of Part II of this series.

[1] Kenan Malik “Abbott’s letter shows how antiracism has been reduced to decrying ‘white privilege’ The Observer 30th April 2023.

[2] Ibid

[3] Ibid

[4] Ibid

[5] Kenan Malik “Beneath the skin of our submission with whiteness lie deeper fears about our place in the world” The Observer 7th August 2022.

[6] Wikipedia

[7] Ibid

[8] Wikipedia: Delgado, Richard and Stefancic, Jean (2012) Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. Critical America (2nd Edition) New York University Press pp.27-29

They also list:

🔴 Empathetic fallacy: The belief that one can change a narrative by offering an alternative in the hope of the listener’s empathy swiftly and reliably taking order. This hope is false, on their account, because since most people are not exposed to many people different from themselves and will therefore mostly seek out information about their own culture and group.

🔴 Essentialism: The reduction of the experience of a category (gender or race) to the experience of one sub-group (White women or African Americans).

🔴 Non-white cultural nationalism and separatism (including Black nationalism a la Louis Farrakhan’ s Nation of Islam): The exploration of more radical ideas that argue for separation and reparations as a form of foreign aid.

[9] Harris, Cheryl I. (June 1993). “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review. 106 (8): 1707-1791; Ladson-Billings, Gloria (January 1998). “Just what is critical race theory and what’s it doing in a nice field like education? “. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. 11 (1): 7-24 From Wikipedia

[10] Helen Pluckstone (Ist October 2020) Is Critical Theory Racist? The Conversation

[11] Ibid

[12] Eddo-Lodge, Reni (2018) Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. P.66 London: Bloomsbury

[13] Ibid, p.ix

[14] Pluckrose, p.1

[15] Moira Donegan “What the Moral Panic about ‘Critical Race Theory’ is about” Guardian 17th June 2021

[16] Ibid

[17] Daniel Trilling. “Why is the UK Government Suddenly Targeting ‘Critical Race Theory’ Guardian 23rd October 2020

[18] Ibid

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter. 

“My Experience Of Racism Is Worse Than Yours” ✒ Diane Abbott’s Letter And Identity Politics As An Obstacle In Combatting Racism And Prejudice

Peter Anderson ⚽ To say I'm looking forward to Tuesday evening's UCL game would be an understatement. 

City face Munich in the Etihad in the quarter-finals of this year's competition. You get the feeling that it is now or never for Pep's City to win the competition that has eluded the club up to now. Indeed, Pep hasn't won it since his Barça days.

We've been close in the past, but Pep seems to overthink it. Like when he played the final against Chelsea and didn't use Fernandinho or Gundogan, opting to forgo a holding pivot in midfield. It didn't work, but he didn't change it until it was too late. This season though he has managed to get his stuttering City side purring again. We are playing some excellent football and have Haaland and Alvarez both on top form. Surely this season? To win it, it looks like we will have to beat Munich, then probably Real and Napoli. It won't be easy!

City's fans have a difficult time with the European football. Many would be happy just to play domestic football. For many UCL games the Etihad isn't even full, causing the nickname "The Emptihad". And before every UCL game the UEFA Champions League anthem is roundly booed by the faithful. City have a long list of grievances against UEFA and they have a solid case. The main two reasons are that UEFA failed to sanction other clubs for their racism, and that they favour the traditional "big" clubs over the nouveau riche. 

The first reason stems back to when City played CSKA Moscow. The stadium was supposed to be empty following a stadium ban for racism against CSKA, but on game night several thousand CSKA fans managed to get in. UEFA delegates saw this and did nothing, even shortening their ban on appeal. Also Porto only got fined €20,000 for racially abusing Yaya Toure, but City got fined €30,000 for being 1 minute late back after the half time break. There was a general feeling back then that Yaya was not properly protected from the racism he faced. Much like Samuel Eto'o before him, and the countless others that face abuse that never gets dealt with. If really UEFA wanted to get rid of racism, they could do it one season by proper enforcement and punishment.

The second reason is that UEFA have bent to appeals from Real and Juventus that City and PSG are breaking the rules. I am biased, but I have no sympathy for any of the "established" teams that are suffering from the folly of their own actions. Real inflated the transfer market by selling their city centre training ground for hundreds of millions and then spunked the cash on galacticos. Now they can't afford shit, nor compete with the English teams and PSG. So, now they try to set up a super league and bitch and moan about their rivals. There is a feeling at City that UEFA have bent to the pressure. It's a grey area, safer to stick with the racism reason I think.

City aren't the only fans to boo the UCL anthem. Atletico Madrid also do it. That all stems from a game against Marseille in Madrid in 2008 when the game was delayed as the local police beat the bag out of the Marseille fans in the stadium. Michel Platini, then UEFA President, was in the stands and none too pleased at the treatment his countrymen faced. Later in the game Kun Aguero made a tackle on a black Marseille player and the fans chanted "Kun, Kun, Kun, Kun!" As we frequently did back then. 

In his post-match statement Platini said that the Atletico fans were monkey chanting. Atletico were sanctioned and given a 2 game stadium ban. This was Atletico's first UCL game in nearly 15 years and was devastating for the club and the supporters. The next game was against Liverpool in 3 weeks time. Liverpool complained that the ban was too soon, and their fans had already bought flights and tickets, so the ban was reduced to one game and the Liverpool game went ahead in a full Calderon stadium.

The dogs on the street know that Atletico's fans were not monkey chanting and that Platini was just thran at the Madrid police. This feeds into the narrative that UEFA also favour Real over Atletico. Whether or not Atletico and City have a case for bias against them from UEFA, or whether they just suffer from "small club syndrome" is certainly subjective, but I will love it, love it if one of them could win the trophy and stick up the middle finger to UEFA and the "establishment".

Peter Anderson is a Unionist with a keen interest in sports

UEFA Lot To Answer For

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