Brexit and bigotry

I think (IMO anyway) the main factor is culture and class, rather than colour. So a non white Aussie doesn’t cause as much of a problem for leavers as people from more culturally distinct and poorer countries.
The Slavs were racialised, but so were pretty much every group at one stage. This was just how people thought about population differences in the late 19th early 20th century. I think the polish are subject to xenophobia and other types of bigotry, but I don’t see where “racism” gets us. I understand basically no one agrees with me on this stuff, though, so I wont push it.

Haha my comment is in moderation and I think I know exactly which word triggered it …

It has also been claimed that Brexit was anti-free trade. I quoted on another thread that to the contrary, some of the main proponents of Brexit have criticized the EU for not being free trade enough, and have proposed a global hyper-free trade area. As I remember, none of the Brexit supporters had any comment on it.

Nigel Farage argues that Brexit will allow Britain to bring in skilled Indians and from African former commonwealth nations.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3630847/More-black-people-allowed-Britain-leave-EU-immigration-non-issue-says-Nigel-Farage.html

Lots more on the need for more Indians in Britain from Nigel, and fewer unskilled Bulgarians and Romanians from EU nations.

Must be lying.

There is no meaningful racialisation of the poles in the uk. No theories of biological inferiority. No belief that this is a different racial group rather than a different national group. Eastern Europeans came in relatively late numbers, with (afaicr) disproportionately high levels of education, and competed (at least initially) a lot of the time for low paid or entry level jobs. It’s a bog standard story of immigration + imagined battle for resources + xenophobia. I don’t know why we continue to insist on using categories and conceptualisations from a century ago that don’t have any real societal purchase anymore (but that’s just my view of it)
I don’t say culture meaning non western* for the poles (though the arguments used against Muslim migration are overwhelmingly religious and cultural rather than racial), but cultural meaning national differences of language etc, basically being foreign. Foreigness, not race.

* I don’t know what Western would signify either, tbh. It seems to also not be a particularly useful category In this case

*Writing this, I realised that someone would be bound to raise the point that, as white Christians, Poles could not be the subject of racism or religious bigotry. Anyone thinking raising this point might want to think about the bloody history of scientific racism regarding the Nordic and Slavic “races”, not to mention the role of anti-Catholic bigotry in English history.*

So how do you define racism?

As a citizen of the UK and another nation I have no doubt that xenophobia begins at the village on some level for many. I wouldn’t be in the slightest surprised by anything Boris said, or wrote. That said, UKIP just elected a female leader. One of the UKIP leading lights who did not get the ring, this time, is Steven Woolfe Irish/English/Jewish/African-American. I’ve heard Woolfe a number of times. He’s articulate and passionate. Are there racist nutters in UKIP and in the Brexit movement? Of course.

There’s no question that Brexit is about in-groups and out-groups, those who feel disenfranchised and left-behind and those who do not. Race is a facile and imprecise construct at best in addition to being nonsense. Ethnicity, kinship, shared culture, language and customs are much more useful metrics.

My time at private school in the UK as a child, two years at a private primary school, was reasonably miserable. Each time I go back I’m reminded that I’m not really British because I was born in Canada.

Indeed, when I was recruited some years ago to teach a course on British culture, the chap who complained loudest was English. Three guesses what his ethnic background was. Yes. And he objected to my hire because I didn’t ‘sound’ British enough.

British jobs for British born, damn the commonwealth and the colonials. Of course, ask anyone born in the north of England about them ‘down south’ and you get the same reaction. I’m eternally grateful I’m free to live elsewhere.

I agree that the May government has been making noises about being friendlier to Australian immigration than before and it was also one of the claims of the Leave campaign that EU migration was crowding out possible immigrants from the old Commonwealth. However, the new Immigration Minister, Robert Goodwill is reported as saying on the 25 August: ““We are also committed to reducing non-EU migration across all visa routes in order to bring net migration down to sustainable levels as soon as possible.” See here:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/25/net-migration-to-uk-fell-to-327000-in-past-year-figures-show

“Yes, it’s possible to be racist against white Catholics from Europe. See also: “no dogs and Irishmen.””

Right, and what changed in the demographics of irish migration to the UK? The average migrant became wealthier, better educated and less Catholic. They didn’t ascend to the Saxon race.

“I realize that this is a definitional storm in a teacup…”

Apparently you don’t realize it.

Is there any kind of evidence that may convince that brexiters were (on the whole) not racists?

Here JQ gives quite good evidence that the brexiters’ (or, at some of the leading architects’) motivations were not racist: the only way he can make this fit with his dogma about racist motivations is this:
“Johnson might be surprised at the range of colours young Australians come in these days (unlike the largely Anglo-Celtic society he apparently visited as a youth). The same is true of New Zealand and, I think, of Canada. Free migration to the UK will bring in plenty of the people that the Brexiteers want to keep out.”

How to write a blog post: 1) assume that your political opponents are evil/racist/xenophobes 2) explain away any contradictions with facts by claiming that they are also stupid.

Race is “strange” by nature. The idea that it has ever been a coherent,consistently applied idea is just ahistroical.

The important part is that it speaks to an idea of permanent geographically based inequality. Everything else is up for grabs and always has been.

@Manta

Enlarging immigration from the “white” Anglosphere while shutting it down from the “impure” parts of the globe is not “evidence of racism” from the Brexiter’s leading architects? Do tell.

Alex: “The idea that it has ever been a coherent,consistently applied idea is just ahistroical.”

Which is why I referred to contemporary culture rather than historical continuity. But, OK, if racism against English people in France is the same thing as racism against Poles in England, then racists are basically correct when they say that “anti-white racism” is a thing and that people can be racially prejudiced against them. Saying that racism is only a thing when practiced by the dominant subculture doesn’t really work, because then you legitimate concerns about keeping the dominant culture the dominant culture in that location (and letting people have their own dominant cultures in whatever place they come from). Every intellectual racist has basically learned that line, and cosmopolitans really shouldn’t support it with their own analytical categories.

I’ll just note that I find “racism” a rather odd description of the feelings of a person who says”I’d rather immigrants be from a country with the same language and similar economics, regardless of whether their ancestry is Asian or European, to immigrants of European ancestry from a much poorer country with a different language.”

If the argument is that ambiguity will be exploited by the intellectually dishonest in support of unequal social hierarchies well I think that’s pretty much why thy call them “intellectually dishonest.” Sophists will always soph.

I’ll add my voice to the necessity of more typological nuance when discussing varieties of xenophobia.

The differentialist mode of thinking underlying white Americans attitudes towards black Americans is quite anthropologically different from the rejection of Poles from English and completely different from the rejection of English from Savoyards (a case I can at least claim some familiarity with, being quite intimately knowledgable about the nuances of Savoie differentialist modes of thinking). In particular, any serious discussion of the parallel phenomena of Trumpism, Brexit and Front National rise in Savoie cannot gloss over this fact.

Generalizations are useful, and I don’t claim one should necessarily know the history, religious practices, anthropological structures and subtle geographic divisions giving rise to xenophobic attitudes merely to be able to talk about them, but using a boilerplate term obscures quite a good deal (I have exactly the same problem with the concept of patriarchy; a concept which should be of universal application but which is in fact used almost exclusively in a rather extremely parochial way making it quite meaningless outside of the anglo-american anthropological system of values).

Except that the policy on migration in the CEE countries is being set by governments, not by the populations, and at least two of those governments are producing racially tinged propaganda to support that policy.

From the OP: “The underlying idea, again made explicit by Johnson, is a restoration of free movement within the ‘white Commonwealth’ (Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Britain). This would take British migration policy back to the line advocated by Enoch Powell in the 1960s, and arguably further back than that.”

I think this policy would move overall Commonwealth relations backwards and be disastrous even though it would be kind of nice to be able to move to Canada or Britain whenever you wanted to from Australia (I think we already can move to NZ easily).

It would be a real slap in the face to all the other Commonwealth countries, and a step backwards because moving towards recognising and celebrating a diverse Commonwealth has been one of the crowning achievements in Queen Elizabeth II’s reign.

I don’t think it would be tenable at all. A better policy would be some sort of preferential migration policy for all Commonwealth countries, although this would be basically a reversal of the EU process to going back to where people from the Commonwealth could move to the UK.

Relatedly, Tony Abbot gave a speech saying refugees into Europe were a “peaceful invasion”, and said ““the prospect of millions of new Europeans from the Middle East and Africa streaming into Britain” had pushed Britons to “vote against losing control”. “Uncontrolled immigration didn’t cause Brexit but it did prompt Britons to take back their sovereignty.” He said that after Brexit, Britain would need a new visa system that would “end uncontrolled movement”.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/sep/19/tony-abbott-says-europe-is-facing-peaceful-invasion-of-asylum-seekers

All the people saying that it is weird for white people to code other white people as racially other seem to have forgotten that in many cases anti-semitism looks just like this.

I actually think that anti-Semitism is seen as the ur-example of racism. Forgive me for going all “pop science” on us but it was certainly presented that way in PBS’s series on the history and practice of racism.

Surely there was a religion component but the Inquisition idea that Jewishness lives on in the blood despite conversion was one of the earliest examples of racialized thinking.

Thomas Beale: “I question the utility of looking for ever finer divisions of meaning of the word ‘racism’.”

From the OP: “It’s necessary to respond to the particular form of racism present here, and show that it’s untenable.”

JQ has been arguing that we need to respond to racist arguments as racist arguments. If we’re going to allow these things argumentative status as arguments rather than as merely expressions of anger, then we probably have to have a good idea about what we’re talking about.

I usually use “xenophobia” or “bigotry” as catchall words that cover pretty much every case involved. If people really don’t want to deal with “is X racism”, then part of that is not complicating the issue when they talk about it.

I’m not sure how important these difference are but I’d be open to a case for them. The racialized British Raj of India was distinct from the racialized rule of South Africa but both can I think be meaningfully be described as racism. I’m not sure what information we are losing by applying them term I guess.

kidneystone@8 – “Must be lying.”

Nigel Farage lying, say it aint so !

Sebastian H @49

“Why is THIS racism so defining of national politics while racism against black Africans wasn’t?”

Because this racism threatens the benefits certain groups receive. I.e. being racist against Black, Caribbean immigrants didn’t raise the possibility the voters would do something which might have impacted the ability of certain groups to live, work, and play in the Caribbean at will. So anti-Polish/Romanian racism has helped to cause a crisis for the people who benefit most from the EU structure. Therefore it has become defining of national politics because it needs to be defeated with great urgency and there is cross party consensus to help bring the issue to the fore.

Anti-Polish prejudice needs to be combated with urgency in part because to couch the opposition to Eastern European immigration as racism (and I’m not really making an argument one way or the other) puts the position outside of acceptable political discourse and maybe helps to reverse the unwanted change with guilt by association.

Analytically, one can recognize that “a” racism can be introduced into politics as an organizing principle and coordinating device, and that has happened quite frequently historically, because it “works” despite — or is desired strategically by elite elements making use of racism because of — pathological consequences for the political society so organized.

Anti-racism, presumably, tries to meliorate those pathological consequences and to uproot the use of “a” racism as a political and social principle of organization. One strategy for doing that uprooting has been to make racism taboo and a potent pejorative. That’s a good thing in the sense that it is a powerful strategic move against racism, to put people who may be inclined toward “a” racism on the back foot and maybe induce them to rethink their embrace of “a” racism.

When you are wielding racism as a pejorative and an insult, you cannot simultaneously be using it analytically. Using it as a pejorative may be perfectly appropriate — I certainly do not disapprove of anti-racism or the pejorative use of racism to further that project — but the pejorative use as a social weapon is not necessarily fully compatible with objective analysis or appreciation.

I have put scare quotes around “a” above to emphasize that “a” racism may be a particular cultural complex and doctrine — a bunch of beliefs and prejudices and cultural norms about Native Americans common, say, in South Dakota, or a bunch of beliefs and prejudices and cultural norms about African-Americans in Mississippi — while racism without the “a” is a conceptual category for any number of such particular complexes. The particular complex may be connected to institutional structures and economic systems that reinforce and reproduce it; that’s how racism is used after all: to organize the polity.

Organizing a polity and society around race has certain resemblances to organizing around religion or nationalism. I suppose that some of the same limbic responses are being utilized. Whether there can be large-scale social organization without utilizing the social impulses of human beings in some ways is one of the analytical questions that needs to be addressed, before a full categorization and context can be devised that would put racism in a distinct place.

Yes, since the real problem is not that too many people are racists; it is that too many people are called racist.

That’s a nicely self righteous way of looking at it. You sound like my dad talking about ‘sinners’.

You can’t try to put half or more of the polity ‘outside of acceptable political discourse’. Or rather you can but only through tyranny.

You can expand the definition of racist to include about half the voters in the UK OR you can keep it as a term which has the ability to put things outside of acceptable political discourse. Not both. That’s a problem with trying to define it all as racist. You’re normalizing the more serious forms of racism by trying to define too many people as ‘racist’.

I don’t think the definition of racist has changed though. We are simply discussing whether to apply it as it stands.

The meta ethics of whether it’s okay to call a majority of a polity racists is a bit beside the point, no?

Sebastian @56, you forget one of the most important reasons why one may want to label half the population racists: self-righteousness.
The benefit is that sweet feeling of superiority: and the more people are labelled as racist, the better; ideally, everybody else should be labeled as such.

And the fact that this “strategy” backfires, making the people you slurred less prone to listen to your reasons is a plus:
“When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God repented of the evil which he had said he would do to them; and he did not do it.
But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry.”

“But we haven’t discovered that a majority of voters are ‘racist’ in classic definitions.”

So what? You’re arguing that the utility of ‘racist’ as a tool precludes using it to describe the majority, or even a very large minority. I’m asking you what you would do if you determined (hypothetically) that a majority of your countrymen were racists. Would you call them racist, or would you refrain from it on the grounds that doing so would be an attempt to put them outside the bounds of acceptable discourse?

Isn’t it kinda cheeky for tenured professors to tell people that they’re racist for not accepting more employment competition?

@62
I think Layman has a point here inasmuch as a society can in fact be racist, even if they themselves aren’t aware of that fact. It may indeed take outsiders to measure the absolute level of racism.

In 1862 in the U.S., even an adamant abolitionist was quite likely a racist as judged by modern standards since it wouldn’t have occurred to them not to be. Even if they were unequivocally not racist, it wouldn’t have been worth their breath to call others such as the term had no meaning. It would have been far more likely that the then majority would have called such a person a black-lover (or far worse) and that would have been the stance associated with a stigma.

At some tipping point, which we’re obviously far past, the term begins to acquire first a meaning and then a bite/stigma of its own. It would seem like its incumbent upon those trying to make the label stick to define their own yardstick against which they are measuring.

I’d also assert that the calibration of the yardstick varies with point in time. The concept of racism against people of the same skin color would have been quite foreign to even a liberal of the 1960s or 70s while obviously now it can be both discussed and understood even if not agreed upon.

“The concept of racism against people of the same skin color would have been quite foreign to even a liberal of the 1960s or 70s while obviously now it can be both discussed and understood even if not agreed upon.”

When the immigrants to the US were Poles, Poles were subhuman. When they were Italians, Italians were subhuman. When they were Germans, Germans were subhuman. When they were Slavs, Slavs were subhuman. This is not a new phenomenon.

Here’s one specific problems with ‘expanding’ the definition of ‘racism’ right now which maps very well onto the Brexit loss. Most people, those actually doing the voting, reject absolutely the ‘expanded’ definition.

Right this minute the Telegraph is running a headline ‘Donald Trump calls for the ‘racial profiling of all Muslims in the US’. As sensible people repeatedly point out adherents of a religious faith come in all sizes and shapes and colors.

Worse, I very strongly suspect that many people in Europe and in the US want much improved scrutiny of everyone crossing borders. Brexit and the mainstreaming of anti-EU policies is very much a reaction to the Paris attacks and sexual assaults in Cologne and elsewhere. As others have usefully noted, xenophobia is indeed layered. Thus, the barriers already present in modern society erected either by ‘failure’ to assimilate, or simply employ the dominant language/dialect in public spaces can be perceived as a threat, rightly or wrongly.

The case of the Rotheram abuses by gangs of males of predominantly Pakistani background I’d contend is as much more an problem of gender, of culture, and to a degree of non-assimilation in respect to the perpetrators. In the rush to deploy the expanded definition of racism, however, the adult authorities charged with the responsible for protecting the vulnerable (yes, that would Labour) failed to act in defense of these children because the adults were fearful of being pilloried in the agora as ‘racists.’

If people really care about the problems of peaceful coexistence we will be willing to employ extra care and precision in the language we use.

The cynical efforts of tossers of all political stripes to characterize UKIP as a collection of nutters, ‘racists’, and fruitcakes backfired spectacularly both in the EU elections, the UK election, and the EU referendum. All out of ‘love’ for the ‘other.’ My own view is that some of the self-described ‘deeply caring’ are entirely willing to lose that war again and again and again all for the pleasure of hurling the charge of ‘racist’ at their family members, or neighbors, both face to face and behind their backs.

‘Average’ voters recognize the hate speech for what it is. Because for the ‘deeply-caring’ the term ‘racist’ is the ultimate hate speech. For this subset of the ‘deeply-caring,’ the using the term ‘racist’ has become a fetish, and the joy on display at each delivery of the charge perversely sexual on each occasion the ‘deeply-caring’ ejaculate the charge into public discourse. Mostly, however, the term is used to shame, confuse, and shut down discussion, if the response to the charge is any indication.

Voters ran the ‘risk’ of being smeared as racists because the charge is effectively groundless, and I’ve argued here for much of the last year or so, largely ineffective. The more the ‘expanded definition of racism’ is deployed, the less effective the charge becomes. The term ‘racist’ has become a kind of viagra for lazy, aging lefties and a marker of virtue signalling for the young and empty-headed of all ages.

Worst, the charge has lost much of its potency and has become associated in the minds of far too many, with PC censorship, rather than civil rights and equality. We know who bears responsibility for that unhappy development.

At 45:20, Robespierre is charged by his fellow terrorists of

@67
True – and you make my point. My point is people of those times would not have called that racism. Its only by a current definition that we’d define this as such.

On an absolute basis – surely racism. On a relative to times basis? I doubt many would have seen it that way.

Johnson isn’t talking about immigration from modern-day Australia, he’s talking about immigration from Australia as it is perceived by the average Brexit voter. Which is the Test squad and Adam Hills and the cast of Neighbours in its late 80’s glory days, i.e. disproportionately white. Australians currently living in the UK are probably also disproportionately more likely to be of European descent, if for no other reason than because a UK-born parent means you can get a passport.

And so, once again, it turns out that racism is caused by anti-racists, who are themselves the real racists. And yet somehow I doubt that the people who beat Poles to death in the street or turn a blind eye to “accidents” that happen to Black men in police cells are pillars of the left.

And people who don’t like foreigners – especially the ones who act foreign – and want fewer of them around could never be racist, of course. After all, racism wouldn’t exist if those people stayed in the places we think they should be.

@ Ronan, you can start with this sentence:

“But instead of thinking through these changes, and wondering what race means today, we’ve decided to go backwards with the left reverting to the racial logic of the past ”

Who, specifically, do you mean by ‘the left’, and in what fashion does that person or persons ‘revert to the racial logic of the past’? It’s crap, right?

Just to clarify the point about Poles not always being white:
http://www.columbia.edu/~lmg21/ash3002y/earlyac99/documents/observations.html

I might also add that it can be easy to forget, while we wander through thickets of words in search of the real racists who are always somewhere else, that people die of racism. And drowning while attempting a border crossing, or being driven to despair and suicide in an internment facility or by the difficulties of living in a place where people are continually encouraged to hate you are very nearly as painful as the discomfort of being called racist.

Shorter Ronan: Anti-racists are the real problem.

Racism as a political issue goes back a long way in the UK, and it has been very much a dividing line on a number of occasions in the past – you only need to think of Powell, the Smethwick by-election, the Relf case, the killing of Blair Peach, the 1981 riots, and so on. What’s different about Brexit is that a question with an arguably racist answer has been put to the people as a whole, and a majority have chosen the arguably racist option right across the nation (well, across England). Up to now it was always possible for anti-racists to say that things were getting better overall, that discrimination and racist attitudes were being ironed out and racism would eventually be a thing of the past. Now, apparently not.

I think it’s ridiculous to suggest that “it isn’t really about racism”, as if there were an approved list of ontologically valid political categories we could consult. I think the working class in Britain has been thoroughly screwed over and denied effective representation on any level – political, social, cultural – for many years now. The Brexit vote is a reaction against arrogant politicians and people who think they know better, and an inchoate revolt against the way things are now. But the people who offered the voters the chance to articulate that revolt framed it in terms of being pro-British and anti-European – even the Remain case was presented in terms of standing up for Britain against ‘Europe’. As a result, the revolt we’ve got is anti-European and pro-British – and consequently anti-immigrant, whether those immigrants are European or not.

Thank you all for clarifying my mind about the variable usages of classifying language in this murky and distressing area of sociopolitical commentary.

Just a word from the deep North of England, at the boundary of academe and the ex-working class: the result of the referendum vote has been to create a fairly widespread increase of behaviours ranging from sudden coldness among acquaintances to public rudeness and insult to strangers in the street. So far as I can see from my adventitious sample, those receiving such behaviours are different from the local speaker(s) by a wide range of criteria: accent, complexion, dress, imputed religion or nationality. In this setting the term ‘xenophobia’ seems adequately descriptive rather than evaluative. ‘Racism’, on the contrary, is largely an evaluative term with little descriptive content, though it is one way to vent anger and distress at these behaviours.

It is impossible from the range of anecdotal evidence available to me to say whether those adopting such behaviours voted for Brexit, but it does seem very likely that, if they voted at all, it was for Brexit. Whether this qualifies such people generally as ‘Brexiteers’ in the sense of possessing some detailed knowledge of the doctrines of UKIP or of the Eurosceptic Tories, I doubt.

I can also say that white male Americans with marked American accents and notably educated speech patterns do not seem to be subject to these xenophobic behaviours. Interesting.

According to the 2011 Hungarian census, there were 5,579 Muslims in Hungary

Probably nearly all Albanians and/or Bosnians, who don’t look (read: skin color) or dress like stereotypical Muslims.

Doesn’t this suggest that “xenophobia” is the wrong term?

Not strongly to me.

Take a historical example. I’m not at all sure that the dislike between Serbs and Albanians is well-described as either racism or xenophobia, but I’m fairly sure that “American blacks seem not to be treated badly by Serbs” wouldn’t make me think racism was a more-useful explanation than xenophobia.

One reason people believe Trump favors ‘racial profiling.’

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/296753-cnn-falsely-adds-racial-to-trump-vetting-comments

The Telegraph picked up the story, evidently, from CNN because their running with the ‘improved’ CNN version for their online edition, or were.

@JohnQ As you say, subordinate, but Goodwill was clearly acting on authority and articulating the HO position, as he was appearing before a HOC select committee IIRC. Off the cuff remarks by Rudd to Australian media and politicians, designed to please and flatter, should probably be relied upon less as a guide to what HO policy actually is.

Howard Frant: My impression is that for some people skin color matters a lot, and for some a perceived lack of assimilation is more important.

The thing about racism is that there’s no essence to it, other than the project of identifying an out-group and discriminating against them. There are times when skin colour identifies a person as one of ‘them’; there are times when it’s the clothes that person wears, or the religion they practice, or the language they’re heard using in public, or the fact that their surname is ‘hard to pronounce’. (One of the really alarming things about the reaction to the Brexit vote is that incidents of all these kinds of racism have been reported up and down the country – “we voted for you lot to get out”, for a whole variety of definitions of ‘you lot’. Did people think that’s what the LEAVE option meant – ‘foreigners must LEAVE’?)

Moreover, if you’re on the ‘right’ side of the line now, there’s no guarantee you will be next year. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. Government papers from 1979 – released in 2009 – showed that Margaret Thatcher believed that admitting Vietnamese ‘boat people’ to the UK would be a very bad idea, essentially because Vietnamese people were so very foreign. If thousands of people were fleeing from Communist Eastern Europe, she went on to say, it would be a different matter – no one would blink at accommodating White Christians coming to Britain in search of a better life… Now look at us, barring the door to the insidious Polish menace. (I’ve seen it seriously argued that the Polish minority is harder to absorb because Poles aren’t visibly ‘different’.)

Someone said up-thread that anti-semitism was different from racism. I think in a way it’s the purest (!) form of racism. An anti-semite doesn’t hate Jews because of what they look like or the language they use, let alone because of anything that they do. On the contrary – anti-semites hate Jews because they’re there. This is what gives anti-semitism its obsessive, hermeneutic quality: just because there are no distinguishing features of ‘Jewishness’, there is no way of ensuring that Jews and Jewish influences are removed, other than by actively hunting them out. But I don’t think other forms of racism are all that different. Certainly the reactions we saw after the referendum vote had something of the witchfinder about them – as if to say, you thought you could live and work among us, but I’ve found you out!

Yes to the indiscriminate character of post-Brexit discrimination. In this little corner of England all sorts of people — different skin, accent, clothes, language etc. — have been the target of public abuse. It is as if the referendum result were taken by many as warrant to express openly whatever resentment had been fermenting unspoken, or spoken only among mates at the pub.

A couple of the early reports on Trump recorded his fans as saying, with admiration, ‘he’s saying what we’re all thinking.’ In retrospect it’s reasonable enough to offer a narrative about Brexit, or Trump, which places these phenomena as the surfacing of an underlying malaise, maybe just inequality and its symptoms. I incline to that explanation. But it’s also plausible that responsibility lies even more with a nexus of power- or notoriety-seeking individuals and the ability they happen to have to mesh with each other and with thrill-seeking commercial media. Boris Johnson has been exploiting that line for years, originally as the cheeky chappy fabricating the ‘straight bananas’ story from Brussels. But with the referendum his poisonous rhetorical skills blended neatly with those of Farage and the right-wing press, and hey presto. From that point of view their effectiveness lies not in their targeting anyone in particular, but in their being heard as targeting of anyone at all not from round here, for any value of ’round here’.

The morning after the result, my daughter, who has the mediterranean looks of her maternal ancestors, was verbally abused on an almost empty bus. She was manoeuvring the push-chair in which my 6 month-old granddaughter was sleeping. The abusers were several seats away: two elderly white-women—a class of person more often doting and sympathetic.
What I felt that day was that: feet of clay had cracked, paper-tigers had crumpled, a wall had fallen.

FWIW I think Jeremy Waldron is very good on this. For example:

> “Hate speech does not just seek to undermine the public good of
implicit assurance. It also seeks to establish a rival public good as the
wolves call to one another across the peace of a decent society. The
publication of hate speech, the appearance of these symbols and
scrawls in places for all to see, is a way of providing a focal point for
the proliferation and coordination of the attitudes that these actions
express, a public manifestation of hatred by some people to indicate to
others that they are not alone in their racism or bigotry. ” (The Harm in Hate Speech, 94-5)

We’ve moved very quickly from a position where the racists were largely deterred from calling to their brethren by a strong public norm that provided assurance of status to minorites, to one where they feel able to express themselves openly.

Phil@94: “The thing about racism is that there’s no essence to it, other than the project of identifying an out-group and discriminating against them.”

Many thanks for this, you have greatly clarified my perplexity.

I had naively supposed that racism means discriminating against other people because they are of a different race (do I have to add that I find that stupid and evil?)

I now realise that in modern usage, racism means discriminating against an out-group, whether they are of a different race or not. By that criterion, both Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants are sometimes racist; English and Scots, or English and Welsh, are both sometimes racist; Northern English Labour and Southern English Conservatives are both sometimes racist; Red and Blue tribes in the US are both sometimes racists; and so forth.

In fact, almost any grouping you can think of are to some extent racist against somebody or other.

While that enlightenment does not much help my understanding of the world, it does greatly help my understanding of anti-racist sentiments.

Phil

The thing about racism is that there’s no essence to it, other than the project of identifying an out-group and discriminating against them. There are times when skin colour identifies a person as one of ‘them’; there are times when it’s the clothes that person wears, or the religion they practice, or the language they’re heard using in public, or the fact that their surname is ‘hard to pronounce’.

OK– the problem is that at some point, we really need a better word than “racism,” because that only confuses people and we get into these fruitless discussions of whether Poles are a race, etc. How about “bigotry”?

I also do have some sympathy for people

I’m not sure if anyone is really “confused” so much as the unique perjorative power oth word “racist” makes people deeply uncomfortable. As it should.

It would not give us any pause to say that the Nazi were racist against Poles. The Nazis made no bones about this. To say that contemporary people may hate this sentiment on the other hand strikes many as too harsh.

The Nazis had an elaborate racial hierarchy in which Slavs were said to occupy a lower place. The British don’t. When you call all bigotry “racism,” the word loses all meaning. If immigration were stirring resentment about Belgians, would you call that racist? What if it applied to the Flemish and the Walloons, but not the Dutch or French? It’s not racism. It’s bigotry. Are people so comfortable with being called bigots?

Thinking a bit more about the remarkable statement of Phil@94: “The thing about racism is that there’s no essence to it, other than the project of identifying an out-group and discriminating against them.”

By that criterion, the attitude of people in the UK, France, Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium. Jugoslavia, Greece, the Soviet Union, at dates between 1939-40-41 to 1945, was simply a matter of identifying Germans as an out-group and discriminating against them. Pure racism, essentially?

Or have I misunderstood Phil entirely?

@101 Rich Puchalsky
Very well said.

I think that the “hate speech lets the bigots let it all out” bit is not true, or rather, it may be true or may not. I supported the right of the neo-Nazis to march in Skokie — I’m sure that the usual shouters here will accuse me of being a white nationalist because of that — but them demonstrating did not advance the public cause of bigotry, because counter-demonstrations were much larger and the whole incident ended up showing that they were a tiny minority and not representative of society at all.

And letting people scream at women going into planned-parenthood centres doesn’t cause no problems neither.

@114 Collin Street

It’s the price of living in a free society.

I have the misfortune of living in a country where the law is full of hate speech / libel/ slander clauses, which get regularly used by politicians to scare and punish dissenters.

@97: Welsh version of that story:

http://www.southwalesargus.co.uk/news/14568827.Social_media_post_about__most_perfect_thing__on_Newport_to_Cwmbran_bus_goes_viral/

Totally unresponsive to what I wrote.

It’s Really, Really Not. “This is a problem you haven’t forseen or allowed for” is not non-responsive: it looks like it’s not responsive, because it’s not pointing out any implications you’ve considered, there aren’t any obvious connections to your position, but that’s really the point here. FFS.

Or, here:

It’s the price of living in a free society.

Free for whom? Free for what? This is basic shit: permitting the expression of hate speech has a real cost, exclusion [exclusionary pressure… but time and mental energy are both fungible, which means an added cost leads to exclusion in some form. The potential-in-all-cases leads to the actuality-in-some-cases. So we can comfortably equate the potential with the actuality: if you’re not happy with this, learn some psych.]

“Letting people see how unpopular bigoted positions are” isn’t worth the candle.

We can’t have a “free society”. All actions impose costs, on the actor and on others. We pick and chose between the costs we want to impose, and “no cost to anyone” isn’t one of the choices we have. And the costs we should impose? This is an empirical question, not one we can a-priori from between our butt-cheeks, and the empirical answer we get is that some restrictions [but not all! FFS I shouldn’t need to say that] on speech are worth it.

“In an ideal world, if I weren’t subject to those pesky ill-thought-through laws against “murder”, we could “deal with” this problem”, and similar, are the sorts of things that this can happen to.

[it might to some people some good if they examined the actual real-world definition of the crime of assault, and pondered exactly why it’s been framed the way it has rather than some other way.]

Collin, mine was an empirical claim: the US model to free speech is much better than the model in most European countries. Letting a few Illinois Nazis march is a price worth paying for having people express freely their political opinions.

“So if we stay with “racism” = distinction on non-racial basis, what apart from nonsense follows?”

I’d say the thing you are missing is that it doesn’t matter if the other party is actually of another race, and it doesn’t matter if you, stephen, think that other party is of another race. What matters is what the racist thinks. This is precisely because race is more or less undefinable in any concrete terms. I promise you there are some Xhosa and some Zulu who do not consider themselves to be of the same race, and that the same is true of some Japanese and some Koreans; and for any number of other examples you’d care to offer.

I feel a strong need to comment on the “Phil definition” of racism. Which I’m not a great fan of.

One reason is that it seems to completely erase the possibility of an ideological disagreement. If I generally despise… let’s say soviet-model communists, because I think the political ideology they espouse and spread is hostile to my concept of basic human rights and decency, how am I not just in the middle of a “project of identifying an out-group and discriminating against them” – and therefore being a racist?

I don’t see why the racial hierarchies of Nazi Germany would have any great purchase in Britain. The racial hierarchies of the British empire, sure. But why The racial hierarchies of Nazi Germany? I especially don’t see why this would be particularly relevant in the year 2016.
I think we should step back and try to understand how people actually view these things,rather than cram everything into our favourite theory. So here’s my purely anecdotal, inevitably biased memory of Polish immigration to Ireland in the 00s.
The complaint was not (or at least was rarely) that they were a lower order, but that they were competing for jobs and undercutting wages. The general perception I got from people, particularly in construction, is if anything they were too qualified. Young, disproportionately well educated (compared to the local norm), hard working. They got a good deal of grief, were subjected to bigotry and (im sure) probably at times discriminated against, but less than (for example) Nigerians, who came in much smaller numbers (and had a completely different occupational structure)
Now make of that what you will (1) I am obviously biased so probably fitting facts to make my case(2) I was a member of the “native” group so my position is limited by that. But I do know what i saw and heard at that time, from people doing the complaining.
If “racism” now just means bigotry, then that’s fine. I agree all these groups are victims of racism. If, as phenomenal cat (and myself above) notes, that you need something more, if not even an explicit biological argument (which admittedly are out of fashion)but a relatively coherent theory of inferiority,then racism is not the correct term.

I do not think racism has the reach the point of chattel slavey to be relevant nor do I think we need a special explanation for why racism triumph in the Brexit as opposed to other moments. At least until we choose another moment to actually compare it to.

Perceived intelectual infiriority is typical, but not always the core of racism. My counterexample would be anti-semitism. I like the very strict criteria fealing supirior based on perceived inherited/genetical attributes to call sth. racism as a nice counterweight to the inflated use of the term in US discoure.

Positive stereotyping is a recognized component of at least unconscious racism. That’s why I don’t think that a feeling of superiority is really an essential part of racism. What’s central to it is a classification by immutable biological difference.

In retrospect, this seems, in its denouement, an allegory of the Brexit mentality:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0054NPLXY/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

You don’t get it. This was a revolt by the British against overbearing French and German neighbours, who presume to speak down to Britain from on high about being communautaire while using that term to mean pursuit of their own interests.

Brexiteers are a coalition made up of people who are told by the govt that “we sympathise very much, but we have no power to change that”, whether it be reducing immigration, deporting troublemakers, bringing back hanging, saving the steel industry, or forcing ships registered as British to have at least half of their crew be British nationals.

The most destructive thing that the political class can do for their own legitimacy is to say “No, we can’t do that. We can’t do that because our sodding bosses in Berlin say no.”.

It is enough to recall Mr. Nicholas Ridley’s words from the infamous interview that ended his career:

‘The point is that when it comes to “Shall we apply more squeeze to the economy or shall we let up a bit?” this is essentially about political accountability. The way I put it is this: can you imagine me going to Jarrow in 1930 and saying, “Look boys, there’s a general election coming up, I know half of you are unemployed and starving and the soup kitchen’s down the road. But we’re not going to talk about these things, because they’re for Herr Pohl and the Bundesbank. It’s his fault; he controls that; if you want to protest about that, you’d better get on to Herr Pohl”?’

There might be more financial discipline in a British economy run under the influence of men like Herr Pohl, Mr Ridley agreed. But, he added, suddenly looking at me through his bifocals, ‘There could also be a bloody revolution. You can’t change the British people for the better by saying, “Herr Pohl says you can’t do that.” They’d say, “You know what you can do with your bloody Herr Pohl”. I mean. You don’t understand the British people if you don’t understand this point about them. They can be dared; they can be moved. But being bossed by a German – it would cause absolute mayhem in this country, and rightly, I think.”

mmm…
I think there needs to be a subtle distinction made between racism and those that think that integration can only be achieved at a certain pace within any given society. Not believing in fully open borders, is not the same as racism. For instance, are the CSU in Germany racist (not denying that some of their supporters probably are)?

Ronan(rf): “The positive attributes that were assigned to the Polish (at least by my telling above, and obviously they weren’t all positive) is more understandable by the fact that due to selective immigration there was some truth to them.”

And here we get into the kinds of things that Lupita tends to bring up. Brain-drain is a recognized thing and is not necessarily good for the country that the migrants come from. Liberal individualism put a very high value on individuals being able to move and work wherever they want, but structurally that might not really lead to good long term situation for the societies involved.

And taking the most highly trained / skilled / young / desperate / whatever workers from one country and having them compete individually with the ordinary pool of workers in another country can look like a very bad deal for those ordinary workers. Whenever I’ve written that here someone has dutifully written that I’m supporting the racists. But this seems to me to be a straightforward case of group or self interest based on economic criteria, and if this is a belief that we’re supposed to be putting beyond the pale as racism, that starts to look a whole lot like classism — given that the people labelling it as racist are young, educated cosmopolitans.

It can be defeated as an argument, as JQ writes, but it takes a whole lot more to to that than the boilerplate “immigrants help our society and contribute more than they give back” liberalism. If immigrants are skilled, hard-working because they are desperate, etc., then of course they will contribute more to society than an average of people that includes people with disabilities and so on. That does not make it any easier for people. The whole argument looks a lot like “Free trade makes a society as a whole richer, so why are you complaining that the factory closed and you’re out of a job.”

“And taking the most highly trained / skilled / young / desperate / whatever workers from one country and having them compete individually with the ordinary pool of workers in another country can look like a very bad deal for those ordinary workers”

but I’m not sure that this is what has actually characterised EU immigration to this country. The actual picture is more nuanced, involves a fair number of seasonal or temporary workers, often clustered in areas which don’t have the levels of native workforce that would make those jobs viable (because there is a minimum size that a large packing/picking/packaging setup needs to be to be economic), played out against a background where the country had gone outsource crazy and precarity was on a rise more generally. The second factor has had the bigger impact of the two, but in general is something that the voting public hasn’t protested about.

Just to clarify my point above. I’m only talking about polish immigration , specifically, to Ireland. I’m actually not sure if the average level of education was higher among the migrants than the irish general pop, (that claim seems a little dodgy reading back) but It definitely was higher than that in the domestic polish gen pop

Bear in mind though that there was double digit unemployment in Poland and more or less full employment in Ireland at the time. There was also a lot of mobility between places (afaik) and once the economy in Ireland crashed a significant proportion of the 00s migrants left. I do give a good of credence to the claims made about brain drain, but probably more from poorer countries (afaict anyway)

I’d say the thing you are missing is that it doesn’t matter if the other party is actually of another race […]. What matters is what the racist thinks

The thing, though, is that some people have an intricate system of values based on the existence of essential differences between what they perceive as coherent group of people but with no reference to race (here race refers as usual to the existence of distinct physical characteristics). It doesn’t help analytically to conflate these people with those who have an intricate system of values based on the existence of essential differences between what they believe to be racially coherent groups. A Japanese who thinks he’s superior to a Zulu because he believes the Zulu to be a member of the inferior African race uses a racist mode of thinking. A Japanese who thinks he’s superior to his neighbor because he believes him to be a burakumin uses an extremely discriminatory mode of thinking, but not a racist one.

Personally, I favor the term differentialist to refer to such ideologies, the neutral connotation being a feature, not a bug (because it would be a serious mistake to believe that differentialism is a purely negative trait).

The positive attributes that were assigned to the Polish […] is more understandable by the fact that due to selective immigration there was some truth to them

There was this book by Amy Chua (of tiger mother fame), called World on Fire, which made more or less the argument that in a system of neoliberal market competition, ethnic groups would tend to perform differently (needless to say not because they are ethnically distinct) and that this leads to ethnic tensions. I don’t know if the book is any good but the rough thesis seems at least plausible.

A step forward would be to reject divisive identity politics and to embrace a much broader kind of humanist collectivism that could recognise the essential unity of the population but attack the socio-economic causes of division

Nicely put.

Chris b mentions John Fox’s research above, which I’ve been reading the last day or so. (Thanks for the pointer)
Afaict Fox doesn’t entirely disagree with those of us saying “racism” is the wrong term, just he defines race more broadly.

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/racism-migrants-in-the-uk-fox/

“Now as before, the tabloids present immigration as a problem. They oftent don’t stop at criticising immigration policy, it impugns the integrity of the migrants themselves. Repeated associations of East European migrants with crime, benefit shopping, and a host of other unsavoury activities, particularly when those activities are sensational, portrays these migrants not as upstanding workers trying to eke out a living but as dangerous social parasites preying on their well-meaning hosts. Racialisation occurs when those migrants are collectively disparaged with reference to a combination of cultural, social, and/or biological traits. Here again we don’t find the crude racism of epithets, slurs, and insults; rather, racialisation gets packaged as innuendo and inference.

The sort of racialisation found in the tabloids does not rely on somatic differences but instead invokes and valorises various cultural and social attributes of the migrants. This is a kind of cultural racism: criminal tendencies, uncivilised behaviour, and moral deficiencies are indiscriminately imputed to the migrants. Though even though cultural racism doesn’t make explicit reference to somatic differences it can still contribute to its reproduction. Ideas like ‘the west’, Europe and modernity that are conveyed through these associations all carry unambiguous colour connotations. Those to whom membership is bestowed in these categories are lightened and those to whom membership is denied are darkened”

(I don’t really buy all of the claims made there, or at least (like a lot of studies concerned with whiteness) I’d worry that it works backwards from its conclusions. But I can’t really judge it based on a few articles)

I agree completely with 150

There are a certain group of people who are going to want to, and be able to, move to New York, London, etc. Other people […] are left behind in places that no one wants to live in who can afford to leave

Anecdotally this was my reaction to the rumors of a Brexit demoting London as financial capital of Europe with Paris apparently preparing itself to grab the spoils: good news for you guys in London, bad news for me.

“If I generally despise… let’s say soviet-model communists, because I think the political ideology they espouse and spread is hostile to my concept of basic human rights and decency, how am I not just in the middle of a “project of identifying an out-group and discriminating against them” – and therefore being a racist?”

For the politicians using racism in this expanded mode this is a virtue. Political disagreements can be initially exiled by delegtimizing them. It is s very powerful weapon for now.

The problem with it is that it almost forces you to ignore a bunch of underlying problems and let them fester. As people complaining about those problems get repeatedly labeled racist, you are normalizing the idea that maybe racists aren’t so bad after all while simultaneously lumping more and more people with actual racists.

It is like the US relying too heavily on invasions and attacks for its foreign policy. Eventually the dynamic comes back to haunt you. The fact that you sowed the seeds doesn’t excuse the evil people who cultivate the crops. But if you fail to see how you are sowing the seeds you can’t deal effectively with your part in the dynamic. People like Layman seem to think that I don’t want to deal with the actual racists. But that is like accusing the people who notice the US’s part in the poisonous Middle East dynamic as not wanting to deal with the terrorists.

Part of dealing with the terrorists is noticing the bad dynamic you are a part of. Becoming suspicious of all Muslims and starting to label them all terrorists just because some are found in their midst isn’t helping.

Part of dealing with the racists (the real ones not the expanded definition) is realizing our part in creating a dynamic where they can come to power.

“It leads to the question I asked you earlier: What will you do if you discover that the majority is racist?”

It doesn’t lead to that question as the majority isn’t racist in some sort of irredeemable needs to be put out side the boundaries of acceptable discourse kind of way.

If my grandmother had wheels maybe she would be a bike. But the fact that I have a grandmother doesn’t “lead to” the question of whether or not she is a bike. The dynamic I see is over-labeling people with completely legitimate complaints as ‘racist’ in order to not have to deal with their complaints. That dynamic sows the seeds for giving actual racists much more power.

The impulse here seems to be “they should be blaming someone else more than immigrants”. That reaction doesn’t seem to deal with the reality of how politics operates. If you ignore their problems too long, actual racists will come in, amplify, and prey on all sorts of deeply wired human fears. You want to say “they shouldn’t have deeply wired human fears”. I’m saying “if you deal with their problems evil people will have a lot more trouble preying on the deeply wired human fears”.

“It doesn’t lead to that question as the majority isn’t racist in some sort of irredeemable needs to be put out side the boundaries of acceptable discourse kind of way.”

Never? Really? What prevents a majority from being racist in some sort of irredeemable, needs to be put outside the boundaries of acceptable discourse kind of way?

“But the fact that I have a grandmother doesn’t “lead to” the question of whether or not she is a bike. ”

No, but if she were a racist rather than a bike, and she happened to be the racist the naming of which crossed the threshold where calling her a racist, too, meant that you were calling more than 50% of society racist, would you call her a racist, or would you refrain from the description so as to ensure that you didn’t exclude the views of the majority from the realm of acceptable discourse? It’s a serious question, one you should answer in some way other than claiming the situation is impossible, given the massive amount of historical evidence demonstrating that a majority can, indeed, be racist.

“I don’t know about never, but worrying about it distracts from the fact that it doesn’t have to do with the current situation.”

I rather thank that determination is up for debate. Without deciding either way, what I’m asking you to do is to reconcile your notions that 1) ‘racist’ is a term is better used to define the range of acceptable discourse than to describe a racist, and 2) ‘racist’ should never be used to the extent that it describes the majority,

with the possibility that a society might in fact be made up of a majority of racists.

Further to that, I’m asking you to consider history and ask yourself whether you think societies which are majority racist are in fact so uncommon as to make that reconciliation unnecessary.

The silliness of this “push a majority out of bounds of acceptable discourse” bit made it a good joke once, but maybe it’s starting to be less funny with repetition. Can a minority really push a majority out of the bounds of acceptable discourse? Sure, in the minority’s opinion. Whenever there is an elite, they pretend that the lower class is too uncouth for polite society, not fit for acceptable discourse. But the lower class sure continues to exist and they continue to talk as the lower class does among themselves. There is absolutely nothing new about this.

Anti-racism as an Overton Window setting controlling what can be respectably said can work when the number of racism-speakers is small, and it can’t really work when the number of racism-speakers is large. Predictably, definitions that increase the number of racism-speakers by definition make this strategy not work as an anti-racist strategy, but they do make it work as an elite marker. And if the society really is racist so that racism-speakers are a majority by any definition, the strategy can not work. But I guess that this is all just too complicated.

“Because that’s a case where you and I agree that over labeling is occurring. You see the difference?”

Sure, but you refuse to engage on what you think the utility of the label is. If the label properly applied to a majority or near majority both now and in the last 30-50 years, we nevertheless got lots done with racist people until now. So it is a label that doesn’t make much political difference.

What changed? Perhaps we should work on changing the thing that changed? Or at least look at that so we can make an informed decision about it.

This is all fluff and intellectual masturbation. If you want to know why a Brexit passed:

1: terror attacks in France
2. Muslim immigration from Turkish refugee camps and the Maghreb in the millions. Mostly young men.
3. London 7/7 bombings
4: Rotherham, which shows that in a low trust and highly polarized society, police start to look after themselves. If fear of being called racist is huge, then better to let 1200 girls be raped. See Putnam or any other scholar on diversity and trust.

We know diversity has costs associated with it that are apparently verboten to acknowledge. Personally, I believe strongly in completely open borders. But to think we can convince others through lying and obfuscation is grossly mistaken.

A positive case for open borders, while recognizing the costs of a low trust, litigious society with terrorism and high transaction costs can be made. Let’s start making it.

“Sure, but you refuse to engage on what you think the utility of the label is.”

I think the label is useful for describing racism. That’s its utility. It’s like cold, or large, or green. I don’t think it’s a tool to be abandoned because it points to an outcome you’d rather not contemplate.

@ Sebastian H, in this context, the leaders gave people an opportunity to express many things, including racism, in a vote; and some of those leaders told them it was OK to decide on the basis of racism. So, many did. We’ve seen the polls which help to confirm that. Was every single person who voted for Brexit a racist? Surely not. Was racism a big part of it? Surely so. Ought we to refrain from calling it racism over concerns about the utility of that word? No, I don’t think so; racism is surely as strong a factor as any other, perhaps the strongest one, and ignoring that won’t help.

Because the exit polls suggest racism was a big factor, and because some leaders fanned that racism. When last did the UK have a referendum like this, where the campaign for it was explicitly racist?

“It seems likely that you are mixing cause and effect. ”

No, I’m just trying to answer your questions with brevity.

“You don’t explain why you think racism is as strong a factor as any other…”

Because the exit polls show it was.

“What changed to make it so powerful? ”

What happened was leaders of mainstream political parties campaigned on racism, granting people license to vote on racist grounds.

“Your label isn’t doing you any good because it is obscuring the things you need to look at to fix the problem.”

On the contrary, if voters were empowered to be racist by their leaders, un-empowering them to be racists seems like a good solution. What does un-empowering racism look like? Well, it looks like calling it out when you see it, shaming those who practice it, making arguments against it, and in those ways returning it to where it was before the Brexit campaigners explicitly called it forth. This is not the only thing we should do, but it is certainly one of them.

Also I’m not sure which exit polls you are referring to. What I’ve seen are polls suggesting that there that significant immigration intersected with economic concerns. Whether or not that counts as ‘racist’ is the very question we are examining. Do you have exit polls (or other polls) that you believe show that a majority or near majority were racist in a more direct way than that?

“Well. On the one hand you speak of “the power of the use of racism as a perjorative” to put racism on the “outside of acceptable political discourse”, but on the other hand you say it’s of no use.”

I don’t understand what you’re saying here. Maybe you’re confusing a description of how people are trying to use charges of racism with my belief about how charges of racism usefully operate? I’m saying that in practical effect, charges of racism didn’t allow Remain to win in the Brexit vote and so at a very minimum it wasn’t effective at putting ‘racism’ “outside of acceptable political discourse”. Are we at least in agreement about that fact?

My claim is that people TRY to use the charge of racism to put their opponents beyond the pale. The charge becomes less and less effective the less it is connected to what people normally think of as racism. When it can be employed against essentially everyone who has a political dispute based on in and out groups (which is a very large portion of all political disputes) it loses much of its effectiveness. As such I would not have expected it to be very effective re the Brexit vote because it was being employed to shut up people who had concerns well outside of what most people normally think of as racism.

You on the other hand should have expected it to be effective, because you seem to think it is an effective charge no matter how many people are implicated. (I think. But I might be misunderstanding you). To my mind, its failure in the Brexit vote should cause a rethink of your position, but it seems to have caused a hardening.

RE: polling I presume you are referring to this though a link would have been very helpful.

You forgot to note that they also didn’t think the Internet was a force for good either.

The problem, again, is that you seem to be mixing cause and effect. You’re positing something that presumably doesn’t change very much (racism) as having caused an enormous change in how politics operates. I think (again totally open to the idea that I’m misunderstanding) that you’re suggesting that some unnamed mechanism has caused racist oriented politicians to appear where they didn’t exist before and appeal to easily swayed racists.

My hypothesis is that various failures around globalisation have caused increasing and long term discomfort allowing the EVER PRESENT racist politicians to gain more traction in inflaming very common outsider fears that things will get even worse. (See things like this from the polling:

A small majority of those who voted to remain think that for most children growing up today, life will be better than it was for their parents; leavers think the opposite by 61% to 39%. Leavers see more threats than opportunities to their standard of living from the way the economy and society are changing, by 71% to 29% – more than twice the margin among remainers.
Nearly three quarters (73%) of remainers think life in Britain is better today than it was 30 years ago; a majority (58%) of those who voted to leave say it is worse.

You’re repeatedly asking whether or not they are bigots. But that is misguided. If they are MORE bigoted than they were when liberal people could work with enough of them to win such votes, why are they more bigoted? If they are the same old bigots as always, again why could we work with them before and not now? Labeling them bigots so you can safely ignore their issues is stupid because you apparently can’t safely ignore them forever. Labeling them bigots so you can shame them into doing what you want is only a good strategy so long as you can shame them into doing what you want which apparently isn’t now.

There’s no fucking point.

Every racist ever thinks that their racism is not racism but reasonable. Racism is irrational, which means the people who are guided by their racism are to that extent irrational and cannot be reasoned with on that point. Any point or line-of-argument that leads to the conclusion, “you, listener, are a racist” will be rejected. For irrational reasons, yes: that’s an inescapable given.

Now, if you’re aware of this you can do a spot of meta-cognition and work out what your own bigotries are… but people who are guided by their bigotries aren’t very good at this: cause and effect can be argued, here.

188@ I didn’t comment. I asked a question. And now that you’ve linked to Colin, you’ve relieved me of the responsibility of providing an answer to my own question.

You’ll give it a try, won’t you.

You: “We want people like ‘us’ is an example of bigotry.

Me: “What circle of interest is by this definition not a collection of bigots?”

Give it your best shot. Or, maybe the grand-master of the so-much smarter, Colin HIMSELF, can make your definition work, in case you’re suddenly called out on urgent business.

@ 190 I note that you employ quotation marks around ‘white’ Commonwealth.

Are the quotes used to relieve of you of the need to provide a supporting link, or evidence that Brexit was about ‘whiteness.’ The linked article in the OP makes no mention of the commonwealth, not mention of whiteness, no mention of Canada, and no mention of New Zealand.

That fact, however, does not prevent you from writing The underlying idea, again made explicit by Johnson, is a restoration of free movement within the ‘white Commonwealth’ (Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Britain).”

Wanting and passionately believing that Brexit is about ‘whiteness’ may make your world go round. That said and with all respect due, shared culture, shared language, and shared values explains far more clearly why Brexiters were so unhappy that so many ‘white’ people from Poland and poorer European nations were arriving in Britain in such numbers.

And why the majority of Britain agreed and voted to leave the EU. They’ve had enough.

kidneystones @191 hits the nail on the head.
JQ “explanation” starts by assuming racism as motivtion: but he clearly admits that the policies in discussion are not compatible with that motivation: “immigrants from (what they imagine to be) the ‘white’ Commonwealth”.

Let’s put it this way.
I have to explain policy X. I give as explanation that the proponents P want to reach aim A. Then I admit that from X would NOT reach aim A, and I claim that’s because P is stupid/ignorant.
Personally, I would not make the above argument in public, and would not expect people to take it seriously.
Unless the “argument” is merely a fig leaf over my prejudices and the prejudices widely shared by my audience.

@199 Thanks for the link. First, I don’t contest the presence of bigotry, or the desire that everyone say, think and act like ‘us’ exists in any community. As for the linked piece, Andrew Roberts is promoting CANZUK for personal gain. Doubtless, a great many view Brexit as an opportunity rather than a calamity. I’ve read that Canada does plan to act fairly swiftly to ensure good economic relations. The problem is there’s no mention of ‘whiteness’ in this article, either. A free-trade zone linking the above nations based on the common language of English is explicit.

Frankly, it’s as loopy an idea as I’ve ever seen. Roberts is actually calling for the formation of a new CANZUK political confederation, which as a Canadian, strikes me as a complete non-starter. Canadians like strong borders. It is extremely difficult to migrate to Canada. Canada maintains strict border controls, even with the US. Then there’s the tiny fact that Canada is a bilingual nation and that French language protections render any ‘all English’ project dead before it starts.

Roberts, rather than excluding other English-speaking nations (presumably India and others), wants the fantasy CANZUK confederation to serve as a basis to unite all English-speaking peoples (other than those in the US, strangely).

He’s a nutter.

You’re entirely welcome to assume that everyone but you and JQ is ignorant of the changed demographics of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Britain, but the opposite is at least as likely to be true. Worse, for your argument. Roberts makes clear that he does not envision the CANZUK project to exclude any nation on the basis of ‘race, religion, or even culture.’

@194 Cheers, Manta. I appreciate your comments here and elsewhere. Extra points for wading through the typos.

@ Sebastian H

“If they are MORE bigoted than they were when liberal people could work with enough of them to win such votes, why are they more bigoted?”

Objection. Asked and answered.

“If they are the same old bigots as always, again why could we work with them before and not now?”

Objection. Asked and answered.

“Labeling them bigots so you can safely ignore their issues is stupid because you apparently can’t safely ignore them forever.”

Objection. Assumes facts not in evidence.

“Labeling them bigots so you can shame them into doing what you want is only a good strategy so long as you can shame them into doing what you want which apparently isn’t now.”

I assume you agree that it is important to try to put some bad things beyond the boundaries of acceptable discourse. I assume you agree with that because to accept it into public discourse has negative consequences. I assume you agree that one of those negative consequences is to legitimize those bad things for those who agree with them. I assume you agree that people who think their ideas are viewed as legitimate are more likely to express them and act on them. I assume you agree that if a significant part of the establishment leadership begins to express those bad ideas approvingly, this will have the effects described with a good many people. I assume you agree that his will happen even if another part of the establishment tries to counter it. I assume you agree that this situation has created a contest on the acceptability of the ideas in question. I assume you agree that the contest should not be conceded.

This question has now been asked and answered. Again.

Here are some further thoughts that got too big for a comment

https://ronanfitz.wordpress.com/2016/09/22/zach-beauchamps-article/

(mainly based around Zach Baeuchamps article

http://www.vox.com/2016/9/19/12933072/far-right-white-riot-trump-brexit

Sorry not to reply to comments earlier – I thought my (broadly social constructionist) definition of racism was pretty uncontroversial, so I didn’t bother checking back. Apparently I was mistaken.

My position is that I have no (0) interest in discerning racial types in the human population; it may be possible to identify ethnic groups into which everyone can be slotted, it may not, but either way I don’t think ‘race’ in that sense has any explanatory value in understanding racism. Racism is the perception that the hated outgroup are essentially – inherently, innately – different from the in-group, whoever they are – not the perception that the differences which can be perceived are particularly objectionable. People who hate Jewish, Polish or Irish people hate them just as much – if not more – if they don’t look ‘Jewish’, ‘Irish’ or ‘Polish’; people who hate Muslims don’t give a damn what ‘race’ they are.

Bigotry is an interesting term; I think I’d reserve it for those situations where what sounds like a rational, political argument is being advanced in terms which approximate the irrationality of racism.

“Racism is the perception that the hated outgroup are essentially – inherently, innately – different from the in-group, whoever they are”

For instance, if I claimed that 10% the population is “irredeemably X” (for various values of X, all of them bad), I would be racist?
And if moreover I claimed something like “many of them do not dare to be X in public”, then bonus racist points for me?

Of course, X could be any of the disfavored political opinions du jour (e.g., X = communist)

So at this point is it safe to say that no one has any idea what value is being lost by referring to prejudices against myriad Eastern European ethnics as “racism”?

That basically its not an incorrect label but it is upsetting?

Phil: “Racism is the perception that the hated outgroup are essentially – inherently, innately – different from the in-group, whoever they are [..]”

That’s pretty much what I wrote above, but contemporary culture casts inherent, innate difference as biological.

It’s fine to have a social constructionist definition of racism, but not all societies and all cultures work the same way. Within a particular society, not all prejudice is expressed in the same way. Calling everything “racism” is an assertion that everything works pretty much in the same way that people’s central understanding of racism does, and it’s not true. In particular, the desire to flatten everyone’s experience into a single register is a sign of privilege: everyone else gets cast as an undifferentiated mass of Others.

Rich – I’m avoiding the term ‘biological’ for two, related reasons. One is that I don’t believe in the reality of ‘race’; even talking about perceived biological differences tends to smuggle in the assumption that there are such things as real biological differences (and that they’re worth talking about), which I think is the wrong way to go. The other is that some prejudices which don’t have any ‘biological’ element nevertheless look like racism, in their characteristic thought-patterns & their effects – I’d put Islamophobia and anti-semitism in this group – and denying that they are racism in some essential way seems arbitrary and pointless.

Certainly not all prejudice works the same way. There’s a vogue in the UK at the moment for collapsing all types of crime associated with prejudice into the single category of ‘hate crime’, which definitionally can be associated with hatred of any group: if I get hit on the head by somebody with a particular dislike of provocative CT commenters, that would be a ‘hate crime’. Similarly extending the concept of racism would be absurd. I think some notion of power and/or social exclusion is essential to the definition – that, and the perceived innateness of the category, which brings religion (but not politics) in scope. (Yes, I know that it’s possible to hold firmly to a particular political position all one’s life, and that it’s possible to convert to or from a religion, but neither of those is the norm; as a general thing I think the word ‘Communist’ doesn’t convey somebody who was born and brought up as a Communist and is likely to bring up their kids in the same way.)

Phil: “The other is that some prejudices which don’t have any ‘biological’ element nevertheless look like racism, in their characteristic thought-patterns & their effects – I’d put Islamophobia and anti-semitism in this group – and denying that they are racism in some essential way seems arbitrary and pointless.”

I disagree. For instance, one of the effects of Islamophobia or anti-Muslim prejudice is the desire of liberals for Islam to change into something that fits their idea of what a liberal religion should be like. I’ve read a whole lot of articles that say, in so many words, when is the Protestant Reformation of Islam going to come, or how can we encourage a “modern”, liberal variant of Islamic thought to emerge that will be tolerant (implicitly, just like the preferred version of Christianity). This has its cognates on the right: people talking about barbaric cultures and so on. (Plus Christopher Hitchens. I guess he was supposed to be on the left.) That’s certainly prejudice, but it’s no longer about immutable difference. It can therefore be presented as an enlightened, cosmopolitan desire that everyone get along (on the dominant culture’s terms).

Alesis

An “end” might be hyperbole for “continue but at much lower rates to our country”

Rich Puchalsky @ 218: That’s certainly prejudice, but it’s no longer about immutable difference. It can therefore be presented as an enlightened, cosmopolitan desire that everyone get along (on the dominant culture’s terms).

So, there’s a contested political struggle with an associated cultural dialectic, in which people invent, define, redefine and use terms, like “racism” to persuade, motivate and organize (politically).

Whether it makes sense to blur or debase definitions of “racism” as a term would seem to depend on how one anticipates the partisan contest and the political struggle, since it is a strategic and tactical choice.

Bruce@221: well, maybe you have your own definition of out- and in-groups. I’m not a sociologist, but I would as a first approximation go along with what seems to me the tolerably well-referenced Wikipedia article:
“Discrimination between ingroups and outgroups is a matter of favoritism towards an ingroup and the absence of equivalent favoritism towards an out group.”
Burning, killing and destroying an appreciable portion of the South does look to me like an absence of favouritism.
” Outgroup derogation is the phenomenon in which an outgroup is perceived as being threatening to the members of an in-group.”
You think the North did not feel threatened by the South?
” This phenomenon often accompanies ingroup favoritism, as it requires one to have an affinity towards their in-group.”
And I would suggest that a substantial proportion of Northerners did feel affinity towards the North.
“Some research suggests that outgroup derogation occurs when an outgroup is perceived as blocking or hindering the goals of an in-group.”
And are you seriously suggesting that Northerners, on the whole, did not perceive the South as blocking their goals?

Not so eccentric, Phil:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/04/are-liberals-and-conservatives-hard-wired-to-disagree/237075/
and
http://www.salon.com/2016/06/06/study_liberals_and_conservatives_have_different_brain_structures_partner/

“What’s really fascinating is that there have been a number of recent studies looking at brain structural differences between liberals and conservatives,” said Saltz. “And what’s been found in several studies is that liberals tend to have a larger anterior cingulate gyrus. That is an area that is responsible for taking in new information and that impact of the new information on decision making or choices. Conservatives tended on the whole to have a larger right amygdala. Amygdala being a deeper brain structure that processes more emotional information—specifically fear-based information,”

@ John Quiggin

Writing this, I realised that someone would be bound to raise the point that, as white Christians, Poles could not be the subject of racism or religious bigotry.

Ahem.

https://www.google.ie/search?q=anti-polish+bigotry+northern+ireland

I cant find the article, though I did read it. (could have been a letter) I think youre probably right it’s apocryphal (particularly following RichardM linking to the ‘welsh version’ above.

“That assertion is highly contestable, given the actual real and pernicious history of mass emigration in Ireland”

Well Pearse thought it! But yeah, it’s a small bordering on trivial group in the pop (though I have heard it before a few times)

Unhappy black intellectuals on white-virtue signalling:

http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/43716

Phil 225 makes an important point. Racism isn’t usefully defined as a certain idea in an individual head that conforms to a certain definition. It depends heavily on social context. In the example, it may not currently be the case that political “tribes” are racialized but it could very well happen.

Also, the boundaries between different kinds of discrimination/exclusion are fluent. I don’t think it’s useful to overextend the use of the term racism but terminological pedantery doesn’t help either.

For the Nazis with all their claim to scientific precision it was no contradiction to confound Jewishness (imagined as a racial identity despite lack of obvious visual difference) with socialist subversion (political identity), capitalist profiteering (class identity), cosmopolitan rootlessness (national identity, respectively it’s absence) all in one package (you could add sexual identity, e.g. the stereotype of the effeminate Jew). You can complain that they were being unscientific, so what. Clearly you can’t cleanly subsume anti-semitism as just a version of racism but neither can one separtae it from racial ideoligy.

@233 dax

So we agree that LePen is no more xenophobe than Sarkozy.
It may well be that her anti-EU stance will cost Le Pen the presidency, but that has nothing to do with my point: that her stance on EU is what mainly distinguishes her from the other two French parties, not her xenophobia (I think we agree on that) and that stance is the reason why she gets singled out as racist and extremist, not her xenophobia.

As I see it, the point of replacing free movement within the EU with free movement within the “white Commonwealth” is not to replace less desirable Eastern European immigrants with more desirable native-English-speaking immigrants. Rather it is to reverse the flow of migration and turn the UK back in a net-emigration nation, with Australia, New Zealand and Canada reverting to their traditional role as Britain’s overseas Lebensraum.

Wasn’t Britain already dangerously dependent on imported food (and other resources) even back in the 1940s when its population was 48 million (rather than the 65 million of today)? There’s a reason why Winston Churchill said that the U-boat threat was the only thing that truly frightened him during World War II.

From that point of view, does not make sense to try to resettle as much of the British population as possible in more resource-rich lands?

155: “The socialists in power and Sarkozy have the same racist policies as Le Pen against Muslims”

The mainstream parties have their share of racism, sadly. But the claim that they are “the same” as the Front is a bit… simplistic.

E.g. this:

” I’m sorry, but for those who really like to talk about the second world war, if we’re talking about occupation, we can also talk about this while we’re at it, because this is an occupation of territory. It’s an occupation of swaths of territory, of areas in which religious laws apply … for sure, there are no tanks, no soldiers, but it’s an occupation all the same and it weighs on people.”

That was Marine Le Pen talking about her Muslim fellow citizens.

241: FN hasn’t yielded any political power yet so you can only judge it be its rhetoric.

I have already agreed that the mainstream parties have their share of racism. What I object to is your comparative claim. The PS is bad enough but doesn’t come close to the FN either wrt to rhetoric or policy. Sarkozy, no word in his defense from me.

TM, since you seem informed enough on the topic, can you please specify in more details WHY you think that “the PS is bad enough but doesn’t come close to the FN wrt to policy”?
And what about the Republicans?