Alana Lentin
 

The whole purpose of knowing who we are is not to interpret the world, but to change it. We don’t need a cultural identity for its own sake, but to make use of the positive aspects of our culture to forge correct alliances and fight the correct battles. Too much autonomy leads us to inward struggles, awareness problems, consciousness-raising and back again to the whole question of attitudes and prejudices.
A. Sivanandan, ‘Challenging Racism: Strategies for the ‘80s’

It was 1984 when the founder of the Institute of Race Relations, Ambalavaner Sivanandan, gave the speech from which this quote is taken. At the height of the Thatcherite era of British politics, which saw the institutionalisation of state-led attacks on migration and Black-led anti-racism, Sivanandan spoke words that are as relevant today as they were then. The fact that both Sivanandan’s diagnosis of the problems confronting anti-racists and the solutions he proposed in that speech are so easily applicable to the situation facing anti-racists today, in Europe, and beyond, is a testament both to the entrenchment and widening of state racisms, and to the failures of anti-racists to defeat them. In particular, Sivanandan was early to recognise the ease with which anti-racism could be repackaged as fighting for the recognition of “minority cultures” and how, when detached from politics, this can serve the interests of the state to the detriment of those who face racism. What should give us hope is that generative conflict about what anti-racism has been, what it is, and what it can be is very much alive. The urgency of current times, marked by a deadly global pandemic, climate crisis, the acceptability of white supremacism at the highest echelons of politics in the west, and the endemic nature of systemic racism, thrown into relief by the Black Lives Matter protests of the last half decade, drives the question: How do we respond?
 

Reflecting on the All Different All Equal campaign

In 1994, at the age of 21, I had just left university and began my first “real” job in the Eastern European office of the European Union of Jewish Students in Budapest, with my best friend and erstwhile colleague, Yael Ohana. The Council of Europe was beginning to plan a new campaign against racism, Antisemitism, xenophobia and intolerance, with the slogan “All Different – All Equal”. Yael and I set about the gargantuan task of planning and co-ordinating the European Youth Trains which, in July 1995, set out from six different European locations, travelling for a week, collecting participants for on-board anti-racism education at major stops along the way to Strasbourg for the European Youth Week.

It was my work on the trains and the campaign, as well as specific events that happened during it, which set me on the path of researching anti-racism, and, as an obvious consequence, race and racism. Today, I teach and research race, racism and anti-racism. The incidents that registered with me during the two years of the Campaign, its preparation and aftermath, were not extraordinary; they were the kinds of issues, problems and conflicts that are at the heart of debate and disagreement about how best to tackle racism. There was a lack of agreement about very basic questions such as, What is racism? What are its origins? Can we speak about race? What is the connection between race, culture and ethnicity? Is racism a problem of attitudes? Should anti-racism be represented by people whose bodies are visibly racialised, or can anyone speak on behalf of the antiracist cause? Can states and governments offer solutions to racism, or are they part of the problem? In one sense, the fact that these questions continue to animate conversations about anti-racism should not surprise us. As Sivanandan famously said, in the same speech,

[R]acism does not stay still; it changes shape, size, contours, purpose, function – with changes in the economy, the socials structure, the system and, above all, the challenges, the resistances to the system.

Thus, as anti-racists take a step forward, the forces of racism confront them and counter-attack. Sent slithering down the snake while only halfway up the ladder, anti-racism circles around old questions while racism dictates the rules of the game.

Thinking about racism from a supranational European vantage point in the way that the Council of Europe’s youth sector has been trying to do since the early 1990s is both difficult and necessary. On the one hand, the tension-filled questions I briefly sketch came to the fore in the meeting of representatives of youth organisations and governments from different national traditions, in countries in which the conversation on racism was shaped by the unique ideological apparatus of each. The prototypical divide was that between the British multicultural model and the French assimilationist one. However, other variants jostled with each other, such as Nordic countries which perceived themselves as culturally homogeneous and were dealing with racism for the first time due to the recent arrival of migrants.
 

Thinking about racism in history

This vision of things obscures the existence of Indigenous and Roma people, not to mention the fact that homogeneity in modern Europe is always largely fictional. The German model, on the other hand, establishes the Nazi Holocaust of six million Jews as the prototypical example of racism against which all other instances are weighed and measured, to the convenience of the other states who, despite being no strangers to racism, have found German ‘exceptionalism’ convenient. This “frozen” version of the history of racism allows us to turn our gaze from the messier reality in which race, as a technology of rule, emerges in contexts of colonialism and slavery as well as in systems such as the migration and border regimes of today. To describe race as a technology is to insist that we must always resist accepting race on its own terms, as a form of fixed, hereditary identity. Instead, we need to demonstrate how race, as an idea for organising and managing human diversity, works and how it is enacted within the power structures of the state and capital. Therefore, any real understanding of the significance of the Holocaust needs to set it in the wider historical context of colonial racial rule, the extermination and exploitation of Indigenous peoples, the enslavement of Africans, and the displacement of colonised subjects across the globe for the benefit of European enrichment.

The case is often made for anti-racism to reflect realities on the ground, rather than to import ideas and practices from elsewhere, particularly given its global culturally and politically hegemonic status, the United States. However, it is also important to develop an overarching European reading of race and racism and a European anti-racist project. This is because race, at its core, is a logic that creates a naturalised separation between European-ness and non-European-ness in order to legitimise violence against everyone deemed beyond the pale. The boundaries of European inclusion have widened and contracted depending on political and economic demands: at times, southern and eastern Europe are out, at others, they are in. Just like race itself, Europe is an elastic concept that is there to be filled with meaning: cradle of enlightenment or of domination? Europeans can choose to deny the role of race and colonialism in defining it, or we can choose to be consciously anti-racist and to work to overturn the racialised hierarchies established in Europe’s name.

In reality, the structure in which the European youth organisations have attempted to act against racism is one which itself emerges from the racialised self-understanding of post-war Europe as an uncomfortable accommodation of cultural difference, for the sake of political unity. This arrangement was violently unsettled by Brexit and other anti-pan-European nationalisms around the continent. Understood today as cultural distinctions, European diversity was previously openly spoken of as racial – each nation a homeland for a “natural folk”. The overlapping and mutually constitutive character of culture and race as ways of expressing human difference means that, to this day, there is no clear way of pulling one from the other. Race, as a shorthand for encapsulating human differences and setting them in stone to facilitate European hegemony, has always relied on motifs of culture, religion, and geography, as much as biology and genetics, to make its case. However, the predominant European approach to race after the Holocaust was to label it a taboo word, and to uphold culture or ethnicity as better ways to talk about our diversity. The problem with this is that it left a silence about what race as a mechanism of rule had done to the majority of the world’s population, and the detrimental effects racial ways of seeing the world has had on the lives of those who migrated into within Europe’s borders. No degree of semantic replacement of ‘culture’ for ‘race’ could do away with the effects of systematic discrimination, exploitation, incarceration, inferior educational and employment opportunities on those still on the receiving end of racism, long after the official abandonment of race.
 

The relations between racism and anti-racism

Twenty-five years after the All Different – All Equal campaign launched, we should question the pedagogical benefits of centring the cultural and sidelining the legacies of race in top-down European approaches to anti-racism. This critical warning was also to be found at the time. In particular, Black participants in the 1995 European Youth Week, who in fact were significantly underrepresented, raised their voices about racist treatment and the reproduction of racist ideas by the very institutions that had tasked themselves with fighting racism. This points to the concern that the stress placed on intercultural communication as a way out of racism and towards better understanding, co-operation, and, it was hoped, tolerance, lent itself to the universalisation of racism. That is, racism understood as an attitude, and one that could be found among all groups. This led to a failure to see how racism operated specifically, as anti-blackness, Islamophobia, anti-Roma racism, and so on.

Furthermore, constructing racism as a problem of insufficient cultural knowledge and challenging it through the encouragement of greater empathy ignored the roots of racist attitudes and behaviours which were seen as located in the individual, as were the solutions, thus ignoring its structural dimensions. The prototype for anti-racist action was thus the resistance fighter – a singular beacon of moral fortitude, a figure with which all Europeans were encouraged to identify. Yet, the continuation of the racial project relied on identifying racism as an aberration from European culture and seeing anti-racism as, above all, a moral rather than a political project. To be racist, in the common-sense understanding, is to be immoral, irrational, and extremist. Alternatively, everyone is seen as a potential racist in ways that detach it from the sociologist Miri Song has called racism’s “historical basis, severity, and power” (2014: 125). A view of racism which sees it as underpinning a range of institutional practices, laws, policies, and ways of thinking, is often presented as an exaggeration because to see racism in these terms would be to see it “everywhere”, as many on both right and left of the political spectrum warn. However, tracing how racism emerged through practices of rule and systems of thought that developed over the course of European modernity is, in fact, to reject seeing racism everywhere. In reality, it is those who believe that we can detach racism from these histories and relocate it in the attitudes and behaviours of individual “anyones” who turn racism into a fuzzy and unhelpful concept. Any approach to doing anti-racism must therefore work with a realistic and historicised account of racism which grasps the centrality of race to the idea of Europe. It must also take into consideration local realities and how they shift over time, often in reaction to global frames and trends.
 

Concluding thoughts

Today, in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis, during which the structural inequities of racism are amplified, not only by the disproportionate effects of the pandemic itself, but also by the unabated police violence against Black people in the United States which resonated across the globe and spurred local Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, there is a renewed questioning of the mission of anti-racism. Concepts such as ‘systemic racism’ and ‘white supremacy’, very little spoken of during the All Different – All Equal campaign, although they were equally present, are now common terms. At the same time, the willingness of state and international institutions to address racism with urgency is less apparent, and the pushback from nativist racism and populism has redoubled as racism becomes a topic for debate, open to denial and redefinition. To an extent, this should be seen as a signal of the success of anti-racist activists to put racism as an exploitative structure, rather than a uniquely moral challenge, on the agenda. Faced with the logical consequence that to address racism materially would trigger a loss in the unquestioned advantage that white Europeans have over others, it is no surprise that anti-racists and anti-fascists who prioritise a reckoning with the legacies of European racial colonialism and its continuing effects are labelled as extremists. At the same time, much effort is made to align “true anti-racism” with a liberal centrism that detaches racism from this history and makes it everyone’s problem, a major consequence of which is the suggestion that “anti-white racism” now poses a threat to rival “old racism”.

As Sivanandan suggests in the opening epitaph, a focus on cultural identity as the primary vector for resisting racism diverts what should remain a political struggle into the realm of the individual. As he also said, “the personal is not the political, the political is personal”. A European anti-racist pedagogy, then, might well incorporate intercultural understanding based on mutual respect for differing standpoints, but it cannot proceed as though the different values accorded to these positions were not entirely shaped by the formations of European racialised power which underpins the political, social and economic reality we live with today. Put another way, an anti-racist project cannot take as its prototypical actor a white, middle class subject around whom those still thought of as “other” are arranged. However, neither must the intercultural project be replaced by the retreat to what are presented as the first positions of cultural authenticity. On the contrary, a European anti-racist project can be re-envisioned through a commitment to honesty about Europe’s racial-colonial past, to a project of (un)learning that eschews denial and the ahistorical universalisation of racism, and a focus on the specific material concerns of those most affected by ongoing racist practices. Today, these can be seen most acutely at the frontiers of the continent, in particular the Mediterranean, in the violence of policing and carceral systems, in the inequities of education, employment, health and housing, and in the rise in acceptability and popularity of a racist politics targeting Muslims, Black people, Jews, Roma, and migrants and asylum seekers.

Justice is a practice and not only an aspiration. Therefore, we may all be different, but in practice, we are not all equal. The goal is to move beyond aspiration to action.

References

Sivanandan A. (2019), ‘Challenging Racism: Strategies for the 1980s’, Communities of resistance: writings on black struggles for socialism, London, Verso.

Song M. (2014), ‘Challenging a Culture of Racial Equivalence’, British Journal of Sociology, 65(1), pp. 107–29.
 

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