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"I'm not a racist, but..."
For a broader perspective on the debate on how South Africa can deal with the challenge of racism as a social phenomenon, we thought it would help to take a peek at the same issue in another society with which we share important historical ties. As the United Kingdom heads toward a general election, Rupert Read argues that to be class-prejudiced or to be xenophobic is as bad as to be racist. Somehow, racism has come to be seen as the worst form of prejudice – but it is not.
Many voters are "against immigration" and against foreign aid (they say things to me on the doorstep along the lines of: "We should take care of our own; that's enough"); and yet they insist that they are not racists. This includes many Tories and the entire UK Independence Party – and many ordinary voters.
My reaction, perhaps like yours, is to suspect that actually, in many cases, they are indeed racists. But it is hard to prove that; dangerous to say it (at least to someone's face) – and, I increasingly suspect, not always true, not by any means.
The real problem comes when the person saying something like this is black or Asian themselves. A good example would be the Asian Tory peer Sayeeda Warsi, who went on "Question Time" up against Nick Griffin, but who has time and time again conceded alarmingly much ground to him.
Among others, she said: “What this country has a problem with is not people of different kinds coming into this country and making a contribution, but the problem that nobody knows who is coming in, who is going out – the fact that we don’t have a border police; we don’t have proper checks; we don’t have any idea how many people are here, who are unaccounted.
“It’s that lack of control and not knowing that makes people feel uneasy, not the fact that somebody of a different colour or a different religion or different origin is coming into our country,” she said.
Is it really at all plausible to call her a racist?
So this is what I am thinking: do not those of us who are unhappy with the views of the likes of Warsi need tactically to shift ground? Do we not need more accurately to identify what is unacceptable about the proposals of UKIP, Warsi, and others?
What I am saying boils down to this: when people say “I’m not racist, but…”, perhaps we ought to take them at face value.
Instead of becoming involved in a completely counterproductive “Yes, you are!” back-and-forth, why not say something like: "Okay, I accept that you are not a racist. You are not prejudiced for or against anyone and everyone merely on the grounds of their skin pigmentation. But that doesn't make your position any more acceptable.
"Because you are prejudiced against people from abroad, and you are prejudiced in particular against poor people (from abroad). You want to stop people from other countries coming to live here, especially if they lack money, and yet you are not willing to offer serious levels of help to other countries to sort out their desperate economic/environmental problems.
"How is that compatible with humanity? With human decency? How is it decent for you to create Fortress Britain, and just let people in the rest of the world go hang?"
Class prejudice is in many cases the real driving force of politics and of social attitudes. And failing to take classism seriously, results in our losing the so-called white working class – class it where it is at. It is class that explains the lack of solidarity between black/Asian Tories and black/Asian foreigners, etc.
(By the way, the term "classism" has its own vicissitudes. What is at stake in connection with whether ‘classism’ is the right word to use hereabouts is the distinction between exploitation and oppression/prejudice. It is conceivable, although not very likely, that you could have capitalist societies in which there was no gender or racial inequality. That is why liberals committed to a broadly capitalist society often can be genuinely opposed to racism and sexism, and very good it is, too, when they are.
What is not at all conceivable is that you could have capitalism without exploitation and hence without classes. We need to ensure we do not collapse the two. Collapsing exploitation into prejudice leads to the danger of confusing what Marx called "real human equality" with the kind of 'political equality' that marks the limits of what is possible in this society for both the exploited and the oppressed.
Such equating can lead to treating class as merely an identity. It is, or at least can be, an identity, but it is also so much more than that. It is an inevitable economic reality, so long as we allow exploitative capitalist relations to continue.
But the present post concerns chiefly prejudice; so I will now leave aside this important worry, and return to my main argument.)
What all this boils down to is that even if anti-immigration politicians and their supporters are not racists, nevertheless they surely are both classist and xenophobic. It is not acceptable to want to pull up the drawbridge and leave other human beings suffering outside it (particularly when, as a result of trade etc., it is often partly our responsibility that their economies and environments are in such desperate shape). Even if you are black or Asian, it is not acceptable to want to keep other people out of where you live, simply because you are happy with what you have.
To be class-prejudiced is as bad as to be racist. To be xenophobic is as bad as to be racist. Somehow, racism has come to be seen as the worst form of prejudice – but it is not. Any form of prejudice, anything that stops us seeing the other as fully human, and that stops us from treating them decently, is unacceptable.
It is unacceptable to be prejudiced against someone simply because they have a different accent, or simply because they are poorer than you, or simply because they live abroad. If we think of racism as ‘the worst’, then these other forms of discrimination – such as looking down on people and actively discriminating against them because of their accent, among others – come to seem not really that bad. But they are.
So: we do not need to try to pin the 'racist' label on those on the right-wing of British politics who are, in practice, in danger of being little more than the 'acceptable' face of the British National Party. We can slam their attitudes on immigration and on foreign aid without resorting to any such tendentiousness. We can convict them of being uncaring, of being classist, of being prejudiced against the poor and against those from poor countries, of being unwilling to share, of being xenophobic.
That is enough.
The original article was first published on openDemocracy at www.opendemocracy.net, 28/01/2010
