he speed with which it happened was the first clue that it was there all along, lying in wait. We went to sleep last Thursday and awoke in a country where racist graffiti, racial slurs and race-related violence is a daily occurrence. The fact that it happened figuratively overnight should not fool us into thinking it literally happened overnight. Since last Friday, there has been a 60% spike in race-related incidents. How did we get here? In a country where the BNP has retreated, Ukip has one MP (a Conservative party defector at that) andNigel Farage failed to get elected to the British parliament seven times, how did Brexit get us here?
We are here because we have always been here. Antipathy towards migrants has been simmering away in the background of tolerant Britain, unrecognised by a complacent establishment. It was only a matter of time before one big event gave the undercurrent of racism sanction. Racism is not a side-effect of the referendum, it is the reason why the referendum, on the face of it a rather technical question on governance and subsidies and economics, gained such critical traction. It gave outline and shape to xenophobia, which the result animated.
True, the campaign appealed to the basest of anti-immigration fears, a drumbeat of hostility that culminated in Thursday’s vote effectively being a plebiscite on all immigration. The race-related incidents since then prove that one cannot ringfence certain types of immigrant debates from others. Xenophobia is not a subtle creature. Aggression over the past few days has been aimed at everyone – EU migrants and also British-born people of colour.
In a way, the events of the past few days are a good thing, as we are now forced to confront the fact that there is profound unacknowledged racism in this country; the result of a lack of attention to issues of race on the one hand and a sharpened political and media tone on immigration on the other. Sure, Great Britain is a “tolerant” country, but only in the negative sense. Immigrants were tolerated, not embraced. Sure, Britain is a “diverse” country, but is it an integrated one?It is also a wakeup call to those who recognise racism only when it is played out like a scene from Django Unchained, those who think that racism has to be some vulgar incident perpetrated only by the backward, ignorant and poorly educated, those who believe that racism has to be an act, rather than a complicated and intangible framework that sets up obstacles. One of the most frustrating aspects of discussions about immigration and racism in the UK is the constant denial on the liberal right and left of centre that the status quo is not working, and that racism happens down there in the trenches where people are fighting over resources.
Oh, but now this is highfalutin identity politics to be sneered at along with your safe spaces and trigger warnings. Do you not see how diverse the country is, how we welcomed immigrants from all over the world, look how very colourful my neighbourhood is. This revelling in the comfort of diversity, as if immigrants were somehow fauna and flora, is no more apparent than in London. A brown Muslim mayor was elected and 40% of the population is not white, but this vibrant cosmopolitanism co-exists with a fierce hermeticism. Integration isn’t the ability to take a picture on the tube and see people of every colour. Integration is to look into your workplace, your government, your media and your social circle, and on finding it inexplicably white, understanding that it is not because of class, or education, or economic circumstances, but race.Or that most British of refuges, class. It’s not about race, we are not America, it is about class, and white, working-class people have it just as bad. A litany of non sequiturs meets anyone who dares to suggest that bigotry is not just the issue of the extreme right or the dispossessed. Anything to avoid the introspection needed to get beyond even the most rudimentary of understandings of how race accrues privilege and how privilege blinds people to race.
In a way the blunder of the metropolitan elites who are bewildered to find themselves living in Brexit Britain was not to forget that working-class people exist, but that migrants exist; that entire communities were under-represented and non-mainstream and you, who think you are their natural allies, have failed them. You thought, they are British like me, and that believing that was enough. They are British, but not like you. Black and ethnic minority people are under-represented in almost all sectors of influence: academia, media and, most critically, government. Currently, around 6% of members of both Houses are of anethnic minority background, as opposed to 13% of the population, but God forbid we have minority-only shortlists.
In assuming that the free market would do its thing, and that the system was not actively racist in any way, we did so little in the way of positive action while simultaneously not challenging the vilification of migrants in our press and politics. It was inevitable that the migrant became not only a demon, but an invisible one.
There is a reason why ostensibly civilised countries that have made the largest of strides towards freedom and equality, that have enshrined women’s reproductive rights and gay marriage, fall apart along the fault lines of race. It is because good people believe that racism is perpetuated by others who take no cue from the white liberal establishment’s inertness on matters of race. That is the real bubble, and let us hope that Brexit has burst it forever.
The Guardian
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