Politics
Thought control is not the answer . . . and nor is demonising the Met
Published 05 March 1999
Ziauddin Sardar finds that racism is in the air we breathe, not just in one institution
I grew up in Hackney throwing stones at the police. I went to the second-worst school in Britain (the worst, Hackney Downs, a short walk away from where I lived, was recently closed down), where I was a regular punchbag for racist bullies and thugs. I came home routinely battered and bruised. I had running battles with several of my teachers who tried to be paternalistic and looked down on me. Some of these battles were resolved by intellectual means - for example, by beating the physics teacher at chess. Others had a more dramatic end. In the case of my history teacher, I actually burnt down the class.
Yet Brooke House secondary school was by no means a racist institution. Institutions, like cultures, are not monoliths. Racism was rampant at my school, but it also had some of the most devoted and culturally sensitive teachers you could hope for. One of them, my mathematics teacher, took me under his wing and nursed and nourished me all the way to A-level. According to my own experience, racism resides not so much in institutions but in the hearts and minds of individuals.
I am sensitive to branding whole institutions as racist for another reason. It is the shortest route to demonisation of its members. You paint everyone with the same brush, the good gentle folk as well as the racists, and thus depict the whole lot of them as social psychopaths.
The step from demonising an institution like the Met to branding every policeman as racist, indeed demonising whole cultures and people, is a short and logical one. It appeals to those who shun complexity and diversity and see the world in terms of black and white. It is a tactic that Europe has used with devastating effect, not just against non-western cultures but also against people and institutions within its own circumference.
In the case of Islam, for example, Islamic law was targeted as a "vile" and "barbaric" institution. This was extended to include "Caliphs" and "Saracens". Eventually, the whole of Islam - religion, civilisation, history, culture, people, past, present and future - came to be classified as "inferior", "violent" and "licentious". In more recent times, development theory dismissed "traditional" institutions such as extended-family systems, peasant agricultural practices and indigenous medicine as inferior and an impediment to "modernisation".
Later, tradition per se came to be seen as anti-progress and fit only to be eradicated. Family structures were deliberately destroyed, traditional agricultural practices replaced and indigenous medicine was outlawed. The same mechanism was used against the working classes and the poor and marginalised elements in European society. For centuries they were a menace, and then in Victorian times they became a "problem", requiring workhouses for their treatment. Eventually society tried to ship them out to the colonies. Now, in Blair's Britain, generations after Malthus, we say that people with "handouts" will become single mothers; we no longer dare say they will fornicate and produce bastards.
By branding the Met institutionally racist, the Lawrence report has made demonisation respectable. I see this as progress. Up to now, only Muslims could be so demonised - as newspapers, novels, television and films habitually do. Now, the brotherhood of Islam has been extended to the police. How does it feel to be so stigmatised, dear brother "Friendly Bobby"?
Society has a long and conspicuous history of portraying people and cultures that do not fit given categories as inferior and unworthy of respect. By trying to locate racism in particular institutions and groups, we try to deny that racism, our inheritance of stereotypes, is an integral part of our culture and history. It is in the very air we breathe. In contemporary Europe, we are not dealing with a single racism based on ethnicity but a number of different kinds of racisms. To the racism based on skin colour, we can add racism based on religion and culture. Muslims, for example, are not just the victims of colour-based racism, but their very religion and culture is also a source of discrimination. The Victorian notion of the biological superiority of whites has now been replaced with the superiority of "our way of life". The best example of this is Norman Tebbit's "cricket test". Jacques Chirac put it more bluntly by declaring that the very "noise and smell" of Muslims was enough to drive decent and civilised French people "understandably crazy".
In addition, we have racism based on perceptions of patriotism. When patriotism is contrasted with the charged language of "immigrants" and "bogus asylum-seekers", minorities become easy targets as unpatriotic outsiders. Bring in the metaphors of "nation" and the "national way of life" based as they are on common descent, kinship ties, language and custom, and every black and Asian automatically becomes an alien Other.
A variation of this form of racism is based on liberal secularism. Cultures and traditions that do not conform to the dictates of liberalism, such as rural traditions of Asian Muslims in Britain or the Moroccans and Algerians in France or the Turks in Germany, are constructed as intrinsically and immutably hostile to European liberal ideals and consensus - that is, as "alien" par excellence.
Large segments of western conservative as well as liberal intellectual traditions are themselves based on racism. I am not thinking only of social Darwinism, construction of racial inferiority in biology, or the racist inclinations of the IQ debate in psychology, but also of whole disciplines such as anthropology, whose sole function has been to describe and contain non-white cultures; orientalism, which emerged with the prime goal of showing that Islam in particular, and "the Orient" in general, was decidedly inferior to the west; and "history", which to this day continues to be written as a record of conquests and achievements of the white man.
Many categories of western thought, such as progress and development, stem from European colonial culture and are therefore intrinsically racist. Consider, for example, the seemingly innocent idea of the nation state, which is seen as the only desirable and legitimate form of political organisation. A people without a nation state are thus a people without a home.
The persecution of Jews in Europe was a by-product of this notion: as a stateless people the "perpetual and ubiquitous homelessness of the Jews" became an insurmountable problem for Europe. As Jews were homeless, so they were shifty, mobile, unpatriotic people with no allegiance. They were perceived as a surreptitious race that used underhand methods to gain advantage. Not surprisingly, they came to be perceived as a particularly formidable and sinister internal enemy. Thus, the basic categories of our thought and analysis, the very tools we use to understand and make sense of the world, are dripping with racism.
Non-whites are always subjected to a civilising mission. Even the labels - immigrants, blacks, Asians - are ways of retaining and managing control. As inferior beings we have to be given identities, not allowed to discover our own. Chunks of our historical being are extracted and discarded; artificially created, superficial identities are grafted. We are thus supposed to behave according to the grotesque stereotype that has been created for us. That's racism: the package deal of identity white folks see sitting on the shoulders of non-white Britons.
I am all for changing the law so we can lock up racist thugs. Of course I want blacks and Asians protected from discrimination and harassment - not least from the racist police. But we cannot treat the cancer of racism with remedies designed for the common cold.
The Met reflects what is. It does not reflect all that is. The real remedy for racism is the task of understanding and building plurality through accepting, tolerating and acknowledging differences that are more than skin deep, but which can add richness and support to our common life in Britain. Until we begin that journey of community through difference, racism will be with us - and not just at the Met.
The writer's "Orientalism" will be published in the autumn
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