The Muslim News - Book Review - ‘We are here because you are there’

Issue 222, Friday 26 October 2007 - 15 Shawwal 1428

Book Review - ‘We are here because you are there’

By Ala Abbas

The end of tolerance: Racism in 21st century Britain by Arun Kundnani. Pluto Press. London. PB. Pp221. Ł15.99
“One thousand wogs [equals] fifty frogs [equals] one Briton. One European is worth twenty-eight Chinese, or perhaps 2 Welsh miners worth one thousand Pakistanis” – BBC journalists’ formula for the newsworthiness of disasters, early 1970s.
These are the opening lines of Arun Kundnani’s electric and timely new book and a harrowing reminder of the not so distant prevalence of racism on our shores. In the era of multiculturalism, where racial slurs have firmly been established as taboo and the face of public racism reaches its pinnacle in the exploits of the celebrity underclass, Kundani unveils a racism that is much more deeply embedded in our very institutions and aided by common media-driven stereotypes.
The book traces the roots of European racism to the need to justify systematic injustices such as slavery by formulating pseudo-scientific taxonomies of race. Going further back in European History to the first real perceptions of the ‘other’, European fear and stigmatisation of the ‘Blackamoor’ combined both fear of an alien race and of an alien religion to construct its ‘other’- a tendency that was to hauntingly reappear in the 21st century.
The book expertly documents the history of economic and political systems; from empire to nation state to the market state, in order to examine the various structures within which racism operated and therefore shed light on its changing nature over time. By tracing racism in Britain today directly to its history of empire, Kundnani empowers readers to fully understand the context of modern immigration law. However, at times, the book can read as a lengthy diatribe against the excesses of nation states and the glaring double standards of Western foreign policy. The premise that racism was a pragmatic ideology constructed during Europe’s flourishing slave-trade gets confused in the wash of insinuation that double standards in Western foreign policy are somehow connected to the legacy of racism. Without explaining this connection, Kundnani seems all too eager to fall into the trap of painting a uniformly neo-orientalist world.
Kundnani points out that the notion of British national sovereignty was a shaky one when understood against the backdrop of empire. Recognising citizens of commonwealth nations as British subjects enabled Britain to import commonwealth labour and sustain links with its empire after independence. Britain was forced to come to terms with the mutli-racialism it had created. During the 1960s, the ethnic minorities of Britain had enough common ground to unite under the collective banner of ‘black’ which served to oppose the collective discrimination they suffered. But the end of this solidarity came with the advent of the New Right Politics of Thatcherism. In place of black solidarity we now had the politics of tokenism; ethnically isolated communities living like self-contained islands in the sea of their superior host culture, a culture that was being reasserted in schools in the form of the1988 Education Reform Act. It was this Act which brought in a nationalist national curriculum and made ‘a daily act of collective worship’ of a ‘predominately Christian’ nature compulsory in schools.
The dawn of globalisation and the market state brought about a kind of immigration which echoed that of the earlier post-colonial period. People were welcomed for their market value - the skills they could contribute to the economy - and not for a legitimate right to asylum as outlined in the Geneva Convention. Kundnani points to the glaring catch-22 in British Immigration law that has fundamentally robbed people’s human right to seek refuge or asylum in a disparity between national and international law: “To seek asylum is therefore simultaneously a basic human right and an act that is virtually illegal.” (p 68) In a cruel irony for asylum seekers “It is in the very processes of globalising capitalism, which Britain has led and profited from, that their global citizenship derives. We are here because you are there.” (p 71)
More dramatically, the 21st century has witnessed the return of a very old prejudice in a very new form. Echoing the medieval fear of the Blackamoor, a new irrational fear of all things Muslim has been proliferated by politicians, the media and society as a whole. The UN’s decision just days prior to 9/11 to outlaw Islamophobia as a form of religio-ethnic discrimination in the same league as anti-semitism, got washed over in the furore of anti-Muslimist sentiment. Not for the first time, the West, as the architect of globalisation, couldn’t handle globalisation’s ramifications, this time in the form of global terror networks. In fact, Muslims and immigrants became almost synonymous entities for politicians and the media during the witch-hunt against all things foreign and alien to the ‘British’ way of life. With the latter being painted in a light of barely muted superiority, the ghost of empire, it seems, was still lurking as politicians made a knowledge of empire part of the citizenship tests which are compulsory for all immigrants. All of this was part of the package of ‘Britishness’ that had to be imbibed by those who wanted to ‘integrate’.
Kundnani scathingly criticises the current state of affairs when he argues that “The market state prefers to prioritise the value of the market and the value of state violence and that it is little wonder, then, that the government prefers to cast around for a mystical Britishness to bind societies together, rather than find common denominators in values of human rights and democracy, codified by law.” (p140)
Kundnani’s bleak view of race relations can sometimes spark sensationalist rhetoric. If racism is indeed embedded, that is partly due to its being the effluent of defunct social systems rather than being calculated vitriol, and the book could have done more to define this distinction.
However, in a world of powerful media spin, blind prejudices and historical amnesia, the book serves as an incisive exposé of an old demon that is still very much lurking in our midst.
Ala Abbas

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