Race to the Bottom: Reclaiming Antiracism

Introduction

When we first sat down to sketch the outline of what became this book, the state of affairs in Britain seemed dire. The country was still reeling from the results of the 2019 General Election – with the British left drowning in acrimony as the Conservative Party, appearing close to implosion just years prior, consolidated an iron grip on power.

Meanwhile, in spite of the centrality of racism to the events of recent years in Britain, antiracist organising – our own political home as organisers – was awash with divisions and contradictions here. Popular discourse on antiracism betrayed a glaring lack of theoretical depth, too often reduced as it was to petty ‘privilege’ politics, anxieties over ‘unconscious bias’ or rival claims for better ‘representation’.

As individuals, our own coming-of-age played out against a backdrop of mass upheaval: from the spiralling crisis set in motion by the 2007/08 crash, to the resuscitation of a mass British left; from the fragmentation of domestic political allegiances, to the vicious counter-offensive by the media and political class, capped off by the rise of Boris Johnson’s neo-Thatcherite government.

Having been somewhat acquainted with modern British history, the developments of the 2010s appeared strikingly familiar to us. The rise and fall of these left and/or radical forces echoed back to the period from the late 1960s to the late 1970s, when two parallel political lines came into fierce battle in Britain. It was during this time that a renewed left – embodied by an increasingly militant labour movement, the ‘New Left’ and the emergence of Britain’s Black Power movement – wrestled with the deeply racist revanchism of the Enoch Powell-inspired ‘New Right’, as the post-war political consensus began to unravel. Those forces of the left seared their mark on British history – even if the Black Power era has remained criminally under-documented.

But bitterness stains the pages of this history as it moves into the 1980s. The Thatcherite revolution domestically – alongside the crushing of the counter-hegemonic forces of the socialist bloc and the Third World movement on the world stage – all indelibly mark our present historical moment. It is one where forces of the left in Britain are still very much on the defensive, and whose political landscape is still haunted by the afterlives of Enoch Powell’s paranoid imaginary.

But this book is not a treatise on defeat, nor do we seek to simply rehash the well-worn tale of Powell-ism and Thatcherism. Instead, we will hone in on a struggle that began to mature during this same period – one that is all too often left out of the story of the seminal 1960s and 70s in Britain. That is, the struggle between the two souls of antiracism: the radicalism of antiracist organisations that blossomed in Britain’s Black Power era from 1967–81, and an ‘Antiracism from Above’, set in motion definitively after the urban uprisings of 1981.

Overdue a reckoning

Developments that took place over the course of writing this book forced us to reconsider our early conclusions and tempered our tone.

During this time, the mass Black Lives Matter-inspired uprisings broke out across the world in response to the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor – including the largest antiracist demonstrations in British history. This was followed a year later by the global wave of solidarity with Palestinians facing down the latest assault by Israel – again seeing the largest pro-Palestine demonstration in British history. The rise of the ‘Kill the Bill’ movement against the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill in May 2021 traced out a possible new path for antiracist and anti-state violence campaigns.

Meanwhile amid a glut of lacklustre literature on racism that has been churned out over recent years, a number of deeply important books on racism and antiracism in Britain were published – some of which we have been able to read, others which have sat tantalisingly on our bookshelves as we prepared this book, all of which we are certain will claim their rightful place in the canon. But despite the euphoria of these recent political breakthroughs and upsurges, we could still trace how often they ended up running aground on familiar issues – both ideological and organisational. It appears that every wave of antiracist demonstrations and every burst of movement energy ended up wrestling against powerful currents of individualism, opportunism, inter-ethnic animosity and empty liberalism.

What we saw was a historical strategy stirring into motion whenever the fragile status quo was contested – which we have termed ‘Antiracism from Above’. Within the space of half a century, this was a strategy that managed a shift away from radical self-organised groupings of the Black Power era in favour of the diversity and race relations industry, which has left us unequipped to deal with the stark rise in racism over the last decade in Britain. Whereas strong left critiques have been leveraged at the emergence of ‘girlboss’ feminism, or the thoroughly liberalised form of queer politics that dominates today, comparatively less has been written about the antiracist equivalent – though this does appear to now be changing.

Perhaps mercifully, racism and the raw arithmetic of demographic figures has spared those of us in Britain from our Barack Obama-style equivalent: a Black face for the white power structure, a symbol to disarm and legitimise critiques of state racism. But propelled by the likes of the Black Lives Matter movements and the urgency with which liberalism is attempting to take hold of ‘the race question’, the time may well be approaching when we must contend with such a challenge here in Britain. In order to prepare ourselves for such developments, our firm belief is that ‘antiracism’ in Britain was long overdue a reckoning, and a recovery of its own rich history.

Far too often, discussions about issues of race, racism and antiracism among the left are painted in the broadest of strokes. Serious assessments about the role and practice (and limitations) of antiracism in left-wing spaces are either jealously guarded from scrutiny, or written off as the simple excesses of ‘identity politics’ – a lazy, thought-terminating cliche of a term which we consciously avoid using in this book.

Instead, this book aims to describe the mechanics of how the radicalism of the Black Power era was negated through ‘Antiracism from Above’. We have tried to resist the temptations of simple cautionary tales – of marking the developments of the 1980s onwards down to the ‘betrayal’ of individual activists ‘selling out’.

Rather, we sought to take seriously the political and historical landscape that activists navigated through in the 1980s, as well as today. That is to say, we wished to think through the possibilities and pitfalls that activists are forced to grapple with in periods of seismic political change.

Limitations

The ideas, themes and topics in this book stem from our own experiences and conversations over the years as organisers, from discussions with friends and comrades, and from the studious analysis and documentation undertaken by the thinkers and organisers of yesteryear. Perhaps more than any other individual, we owe an ideological debt of gratitude to the breadth of work by one of Britain’s foremost intellectuals: the late Ambalavaner Sivanandan, former director of the Institute of Race Relations. If this book achieves nothing more than to inspire readers to explore the rich history of antiracist thought in Britain, such as Sivanandan’s, it would have been worth writing.

This text is by design, a partial account of racism and antiracism in Britain. It focuses in large part on the Black Power movements which comprised African, Caribbean and South Asians in Britain – but this is certainly not to suggest that these are the only groups affected by racism in Britain, nor the only ones that have resisted it.

We also chose to write a book retracing history at a time when tendencies across the political spectrum seem to have become prisoners of the past.

Whether the revivalist visions of ethnonationalists, the liberals who pine longingly for their faded days of glory, or even blinkered by their affection for post-war social democracy – far too many take yesterday to be their political horizon. This book does not seek to romanticise the history we speak of or call for a simple retreat into it; we merely seek to extract it for the lessons it can offer for the struggles of today.

This book is certainly not intended to be the final word on either Britain’s Black Power era or of the state of antiracism; its scope is necessarily constrained by word limits and our own limitations as thinkers. But we hope it will be a humble contribution to a broader conversation about how to reimagine an emancipatory and transformative antiracism that is grounded in the struggle for socialism.

Chapter 1

Race, racism and racialisation

Racism never stands still. It changes shape, size, contours, purpose, function, with changes in the economy, the social structure, the system and, above all, the challenges, the resistances, to that system.1 – A. Sivanandan

The empirical realities of racism are well known and, by now, well-rehearsed: from discriminatory differentials in income, quality of housing and unemployment levels facing non-white people,2 as well as the enduring menace of police brutality, inhumane immigration controls and repressive ‘national security’ powers.

But recognising racism empirically is not necessarily the same as understanding it analytically. Likewise, ‘naming’ racism may be cathartic, but it is not conclusive. How do we develop a framework in which to integrate variegated experiences of racism, and connect them to concrete processes of social control and exploitation – of the extraction of labour, of social exclusion, of dispossession or displacement?

Take the infamous case of Altab Ali, the Bangladeshi textile worker stabbed to death in East London by three teenagers in 1978, in an act of ‘Paki bashing’. Are we to identify ‘racism’ only insofar as the individuals that drove the knife into Altab Ali’s neck? What, then, becomes of the mass theft of wealth from his homeland by British colonial rule – which drove people like him to Britain for work in the first place?

Or for that matter the British politicians who denounced and decreed against this immigrant inflow from the ex-colonies, and placed the target on the back of those like Altab Ali. Or the capitalist class who had maintained urban industrial spaces like London’s East End as zones of permanent squalor, and breeding grounds for racial resentment. Or the British labour market which confined Asians like Altab Ali to toil for long hours in industries like textile work – forcing him to walk home through the dark streets of Whitechapel that night.

Racism did not enter the equation once those three teenagers set eyes upon Altab Ali – it shaped the conditions that placed him in that corner of East London on that fateful night in 1978. Altab Ali was not just a victim of circumstance, but a casualty of history.

Defining and governing race

In turn, antiracism cannot be reduced to opposition to acts of racist violence, but must strive for a transformation of the conditions that enable and authorise racism in all its forms.

In the face of racism’s unyielding violence, to tussle over the question of definitions may seem irrelevant, indulgent or even obscene.

But exactly how ideas of race, and thus racism, are conceptualised and mobilised in popular discourse today determines the priorities of antiracist organising, the forms that organising takes and the basis of solidarities that form as part of it.

Developing constructive definitions so often means piercing through the cloud of confusion and ‘common-sense’ knowledge about race and racism. Sometimes this is expressed in pithy, but politically barren slogans – such as ‘racism equals prejudice plus power’, which locates racism fundamentally within the realm of attitude. Elsewhere, race is conflated with characteristics such as ethnicity or skin colour, as if ‘race’ is as natural as complexion, or necessarily defined by pigmentation. And at other times, race and racism are considered apart from one another – as if to suggest that ‘race’ is fundamentally a neutral category that is merely disfigured by acts of racism.

These are all approaches we reject as incorrect or inadequate in various ways. In contrast we would present the following as working definitions:

Race is a social system. It marks out the structural relationship of certain social groups to power and to processes of exploitation, and indexes divisions of labour and social control.

Racialisation is a dynamic process that draws on physiological, cultural and social markers to determine the boundaries of ‘races’ – groups can be racialised downwardly (negatively) or upwardly, and the boundaries shift over time and space.

And therefore racism is an active process of locking groups within a wider social structure of exploitation by maintaining and defending the system of race, through the sheer exercise of power or policy.

Race and racism serve to consolidate power within the British state, as well as underwriting British imperialism abroad. These often work in tandem – for example in the way that dehumanising racism is used to justify British military aggression against people abroad, who are then subject to racism when they are forced to flee to Britain, before being integrated into the bottom rungs of the social system as refugees or immigrants by racialising border powers. Race is never innocent – it is differentiation for the purposes of domination. And if we accept this, then trying to decouple race from racism is a chicken-and-egg situation: racism is race in motion.

These are definitions of race and racism which stress the fact that they are politically, socially and geographically contingent dynamics, rather than stable; that they emerge from a messy configuration of physical markers, social characteristics and cultural symbols that are shaped and re-shaped by changes in political economy and geopolitics.

Race and racism are politically enshrined, culturally reinforced and reproduced through social practices. State laws (or supra-states like the EU) and policies determine the boundaries of races – such as laws of citizenship. The modes and institutions of British state racism – border control, policing and national security – are the glue that holds them together. Ideological representations of racialised groups are transmitted through cultural apparatus like the media – producing the tropes and stereotypes that become embedded as common sense. And ‘street racism’ by the likes of the far right acts as