racism vis-à-vis biopsychosocial systems: implications for human behavior in the social...

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Philosophia Africana Vol. 6 No. 1 March 2003

Race is Ord inary : Britain's Post-ColonialMelancholiaPaul ilroy hair Department of African American Studies le UniversityNew Haven CT

Britain's nationalism and racism continue to be articulated together. Their dif-ferences in tone as well as political and emotional value are routinely mediated bythe undiminished power of that pivotal third term, culture , which, even thoughit is hotly contested, retains all the heavy and distinctive local burdens of England'specuharities regarding race. The old new racism was a characteristic produ ctof a phase of mass migration. Its culturalist tones are still audible in the anthropo-logical subtleties, disavowals, and evasions of the raciological discourse to which itgives voice. This genteel, common-sense racism finds it difficult to be overt. Themore combative expressions of racial antipathy associated with imperial and colo-nial domination are often regarded as unsavory, disreputable, and offensive. How-ever, nationalism and patriotism, on the other hand, are seldom judged so harshly.At least when viewed from above, these forms of solidarity are welcomed as desir-able features of social and political life. They endow national communities with anecessary strength and confidence. Clustered reverently around the flagpole, themean-spirited people who sounded like nativists, racists, ultra-nationalists, andneo-fascists turn out instead to be plain old patriots.

Defending the simple racial hierarchies invented during the nineteenth centuryis no longer the principal concern of these pa trio ts. Instead, a more timelyemphasis falls on wider dimensions of cultural difference. These divisions are justas intractable and fundamental as the natural hierarchies they partly replace. Butthey gain extra moral credibility and additional political authority by being broughtcloser to nationalism and made more remote from any kind of bio-political logic.Hybrid cultures are weakened by their compound character. Diversity has itscharms, but mistaken attempts to mix or even dwell peaceably together can bring


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3 Philosophia Africana

ed by the inability to face, never mind mourn, the profound change in its circum-stances and moods that followed the end of the Empire and consequent loss ofimperial prestige. That chronic inability has been intertwined with successive polit-ical and economic crises, with the gradual political break up of the United King-dom, with the arrival of substantial numbers of post-colonial citizen migrants, andwith the shock and anxiety that followed from a loss of any sense that the collec-tive is bound by a coherent and distinctive national culture. It encompasses theshifting investments that Britons have made in the monarchy as the institutionalcomplex that produces their head of state, and helps to explain the strange author-itarian pattern of the country's political culture in the period since 1979, whenMargaret Thatcher's populist Conservative Party took the helm of the ship of state.

This extraordinary failure, which has obstructed the arterial system ofBritain's political body, is wha t I have begun to call post-colonial melancho lia. It isa complex pathology with multiple symptoms. The obvious blockages around thethemes of immigration, war, and national identity are among the most significantof them . But further effects can be detected in the country's political and em otion-al responses to its residual colonial responsibilities in Zimbabwe and elsewhere, aswell to its fears of becoming itself a colonial dependency of the U.S.These colonial themes contest the coveted position of victim and are connect-ed to projections of Britain as the primary victim, rather than the principal benefi-ciary, of its colonial dominance. This strand of discourse is common to the actions

of all the populist politicians who have addressed the prob lematic presence of post-colonial settlers, who have described their appearance as an invasion, and who haveprofessed an inability to recognize the country once the arrival of these aliens hasdecisively altered its moral and cultural topography. More seriously, the country'sbewildering patterns of racist violence and inconsistent political responses to thesuffering it has created make more sense once the idea of post-colonial melancho-lia is introduced.I want to emphasize that these problems precede and underpin the poetics ofracial difference that make them comprehensible. The coun try's persistent failure tobe hospitable is about far more than just m anaging the effects of mass imm igration.It bears repetition that this is not a ma tter of rac e, though for many people it isunderstood and lived as such. The consolidation of post-colonial melancholia sug-gests the disturbing possibility that many Britons have come to need rac e, andeven rely upon its certainties as one sure way to keep their bearings in an increas-ingly confusing world. There can be no working through.Britain's inability to m ourn its loss of Empire has unfolded in a slow and strik-ingly non-linear process. Its history reveals a fragmented polity that has not beenable to meet the elemental challenge represented by the underlying difficulties ofsocial and political transition with which the presence of post-colonial and other

sanctuary-seeking people have been unwittingly bound up.As one might anticipate, post-colonial melancholia characteristically intercuts


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Race is O rdinary

trated by the conclusions of William M acpherson's report regarding the epoch-making racist murder of Stephen Lawrence, which marked the latest episode in theemergence of the coun try's racial conscience.'Judge Macpherson acknowledged that prejudice was indeed present inBritain's system of criminal justice, but then emphasized that this dysfunctionalracism was unw itting . To be sure, he identified institutional racism with collec-tive organizational failures, but provided a definition of wh at counted as racist tha twas so narrowly and tightly drawn that it excluded almost everybody and left thesources of these mysterious failures inaccessible to all but the management con-sultants. Responses to his benchmark report also repeated melancholia's distinctivecombination of manic elation with misery and ambivalence. Hostility to the ideathat racist violence and institutional indifference could be features of British lifewas intermingled with surprise at the nastiness of racism and the anger and resent-ment that it causes.

The nation's intermittent racial tragedies thus became part of an eventful his-tory. They punctuate the boredom of chronic national decline with a functionalanguish tha t combines the psychological dynamics of denial and displacement. Theloss of empire and the additional loss of certainty about the limits of racial identi-ty have begun, as a result, ironically, to sustain people, providing them with bothpleasure and distraction. The historical approach tentatively pioneered here seeksless a regular narrative rhythm than oscillation between identification with the vic-tims of racism and tormented self-disgust at the prospect of being implicated eitherin the problems they import or in their colonial and post-colonial sufferings.This strange blend is nowhere more visible than in the culture surroundingsports in general and football in particular, where nationahsm and racism haverepeatedly emerged intertwined and inseparable. For the last three decades or so,the brash motto of true brit nationalism has been supplied by a curious boast: twoworld wars and one world cup, doo dah, doo dah . As it echoed around manysports venus, this odd phrase became an ugly, though almost m usical, chan t. Under-standing England's post-colonial melancholia means making sense of the strangesymbolic system in which it circulates and the warped patriotisms to which it givessuch disturbing expression. The visceral ideas and feelings that it conjures haveacquired a continuing appeal, bu t they have slipped past most academic analyses ofpopular nationahst politics. Eor the most pa rt, the full, historic force of this frater-nalistic and class-bound braggadocio has not been registered in the beleagueredplaces where analyses of race are conducted. Scholastic theorizing is culpablehere for its failures of imagination and principle, as well as for its persistent, symp-tomatic refusal to address the interconnections of nationalism and racism in popu-lar culture.

The intellectual commitment to taking the sentiments announced in thatphrase seriously, making them worth understanding and unpacking, involves rec-ognizing the dignity and value of the worthy lives that motto has helped to lead


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al nation that has not been able to accept its inevitable loss of prestige in a deter-minedly post-colonial world. These words provide a rare window from which allthe remorseful processes of Britain's vanished imperial status can be observed.In this light, the phrase Two World Wars and One World C up becomes avaluable means through which to consider the bewildering effects of England'spost-colonial melancholia even where they have been intermittently offset by thecompensations of the country's rare, but nonetheless significant, sporting successes.The words furnish the truly committed investigator with a compressed, but stillpriceless, history of post-war class relations in what is harder these days to call theUnited Kingdom. All the latent violence, all the embittered machismo, all the intro-jected class warfare articulated by defeated victors (mostly men and boys who werebaffled and bewildered by a new post-w ar world that refused to recognize their his-toric manly qualities) is coded here in a dynamic and still explosive form.

Those words and sounds, two world wars and one world cup, doo dah, dooda h, suggest first, and most disturbingly, that war is a sport. Secondly, they intro-duce the possibility that sport, particularly football, has the same value as war inthe indices of a distinctive national axiology. This twist is a post-co lonial peculi-arity of English life and demands detailed historical consideration. It is not onlythat the two fields, war and sport, are adjacent in the metonymic chain of Britain'sreluctantly post-imperial nationalisms. We are being told that they should be under-stood as intimately connected areas of the country's national consciousness. Oncethey have been rendered equivalent and perhaps even interchangeable, we can seethat wars and sports generate many of the same emotions and libidinal investments,that they articulate the same intense and highly-prized forms of fraternal solidari-ty. The surrogate wars that were previously enacted only on the playing fieldbecome a better, more exciting game when they are extended after the sporting for-malities have been dispensed with . Opposing fans, foreign police, and any aliensunlucky enough to get in the way have all contributed to the body count of theseexcursions. Thirdly, this absurd phrase contains a deeply and spontaneously-con-servative assertion of national continuity. It expresses not national history but ananti-history governed by the familiar amnesiac principles by which deluded imperi-al nations hve.

The boast these words articulate is also an integral part of a bigger denial. Itannounces that nothing significant changed during the course of Britain's down-wardly mobile twentieth century. Under a tattered flag, the precious thin red, white,and blue line remains unbreached, just like the crumbhng, chalky frontier down atDover. We are then required to admit tha t the nations that triumphed in 1918 and1945 live on, unmodified and for the most part, unremarked upon. An implicitchallenge invites us to discover their untimely, contentious definitions of nationali-ty today as a lingering, gritty presence inside the glittery but battered package ofBritain's perennially suspended modernization. Eourthly, those words testify to thecontinuing power of a class-based pohtical language. In a stroke, they repudiate the


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Race is Ordinary 5

blended, or perhaps altogether dispersed. Post-industrial Britain's class divisionsadhere stubbornly to the regional and geo-political patterns of its ebbing industri-al phase. They are clearly alive and well. While inequality is intensified and recre-ated, sport and its various spectator cultures are producing, reproducing, and chan-neling nationalist and absolutist identifications and identities in acute but attractiveforms.Those historic chanted words have another disturbing dimension: their per-locutionary power. This atavistic force is little understood. It produces the artifi-cially whitened, comprehensively armored national community to which the phrasecasually refers. It demonstrates that there are still many courageous and willingworking-class hearts beating around here. The martial I am tempted to sayChurchillian performances in which they are incanted com municate another sig-nificant hint. They reveal that there is a sense in which those brave but confusedsouls prefer an ordered past, in which they were exploited and poor but knew whothey were, to a chronically chaotic present in which even those limited certaintieshave been stripped away by the new corporate mandate of interminable, regressivechange. In Britain's mud and blood spattered past, heroic lions were led to igno-minious slaughter by posh donkeys. Today at last, their belated but incompleteredemption is finally at hand. It is to be accomplished not so much by any occa-sional national victories on the sports field but by another characteristic nationalaccomplishment: unblinking and unthinking pride in those performances indiffer-ent to whether the worthy lions in question are ultimately victorious. England's tra-ditional foolhardiness and up and at 'em daring combine with a monstrouslyexaggerated sense of the country's importance to ensure that it will triumph in thenational pride stakes every time. That triumphant conquest entails a more pro-found and total victory than any mere sporting contest could produce.

The same sinister phrase reveals its more melancholy aspects once the adren-aline begins to subside. It is deployed, but inevitably fails, to block consciousnessof the irreversible fact that the carnival of Britain's imperial potency is now overforever. Any residual celebrations to which those words contribute help to consti-tute not the final stages of that stirring jubilee but the protracted process of clean-ing-up that has followed. They supply an appropriate vernacular soundtrack to theoverdue task of taking down the bunting.The historical record of England's bellicose fans on tour is dismal and wellknown. But there is still a great deal of reluctance to identify these recurrent anddepressing symptoms to the country's wider topography of ultra-nationalist race-consciousness. We need to understand that this refusal compounds the injuriesinvolved in exclusion. Those of us who have had to run for our lives from viciousdrunken crowds intent on a different, bloodier sport than the one they paid to seefrom the terraces, have always been able to know where nationalist sentiments were

wired into the raciological circuitry of the British nation and where brit racisms andnationalisms were fused together as something like a single hyper-ethnic gestalt.


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36 PhUosophia Africana

of nationality have been enhanced by the ideal of purity and fantasies of homo-geneity.The appearance of Noel Gallagher's Union-Jack-emblazoned, but Korean-made, Epiphone guitar may have been calculated to cement the notion that theswinging sixties were back, but Oasis was not The Who or The Beatles and Eng-land has found it hard to qualify for the World Cup, never mind win it. Though itis an invaluable pointer to those sensitive spots where the body of Britain's post-colonial polity was poorly sutured, the terrace chant of two w orld wars and oneworld cup now sounds increasingly bizarre, especially when intercut with theimmortal theme tunes from World War II movies such as The Dam bustersand TheGreatEscape.Beating Germany 5-1 is all very well, but the memory of World WarII has been stretched so thin that it cannot possibly accomplish all the important

cultural work it is increasingly relied upon to do. A generation for whom knowl-edge of that conflict arrives on a long loop via Hollywood is nonetheless requiredto use a cheaply manufactured surrogate memory of it as the favored means to findand restore their ebbing sense of what it is to be English.Devolution and disintegration have intensified a nagging uncertainty as to thecultural content of national identity. Is it morris dancing or line dancing? GosfordPark, Finsbury Park, or park and ride? The failure to know, or rather to feel, whatthat favored cultural filling should be feeds the melancholic outlook, which is fur-ther compounded by the shrinkage of the national community and the disturbing

news that the newly-devolved partner nations in Scotland and Wales are evidentlyhaving a better time. Their student grants have been restored and their senior citi-zens will enjoy residential care withou t the indignities of means testing. This dimen-sion of melancholic post-colonial anxiety over identity shows that the idea of Eng-land can no longer be employed as a synonym for Britain and must contract to fitthe diminished ideological space between a political devolution based on alterna-tive ethnicity and economic regionahzation.Englishness is called upon to manage the stressful consequences of the greatand growing split between city and country. This is now rather more complicated

than a simple polar division between green-wellied middle England and the hipdenizens of the grimy metropolis, which, for all its diversity, is in film and fictionlikely to be purged of anyone who isn't wh ite in w hat we can call the Notting Hilleffect.^ In contrast, the breathless, elated multi-culturalism of shows such as Changing Rooms and GroundForce (unremarked upon by their critics in government)formalizes the delicate cultural operations involved in holding the elements of anew England together. This is accomplished by manipulating its innermost privatespaces and, in the process, showing that taste and life style preferences are muchmore im portant elements of identity than ethnicity, class, or regional ties could everbe.The insecure and perennially anxious nation revealed by these cultural dis-crepancies is inured in a variety of disappointment for which the dreadful denoue-


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Race is Ordinary 7

moment. Intrusions by immigrants, incompatible Blacks, and fascinating/threaten-ing strangers have come to symbolize all the difficulties involved in the country'sgrudging modernization. Outside the goldfish bowl of the Big Brother House, theconflicts tha t result soon call the desirability of that unchosen destination into ques-tion. Britain's Black and other minority settlers continue to appear as a problem,but its dimensions are transformed. Ra ce is rendered differently as a result ofmajor changes that have occurred both inside and outside of the country. Themeaning and representation of race politics have been greatly altered and its strate-gic importance relative to other aspects of government has been changed.This situation reflects the fact that, against the logic of race thinking, Britain'svarious Black communities are not static. They are being actively re-composed bythe pressure of local circumstances, by the new arrivals whose experience of racismleads them to seek political allies, and by inter-generational adaptation as well asnovel and unstable geo-political conditions. The forms of solidarity these commu-nities produce in answer to the racisms that still circumscribe them are not like thedefensive formations built by the post-1945 wave of citizen migrants.Demographic and cultural changes have meant that the New World historiesthat turned the counter-memory of racial slavery into an interpretative device andthat could be apphed to any example of injustice and exploitation have lost muchof their inspirational force. The combative mood of the 1970s was buoyed by theCaribbean and American political traditions that politicized Blackness all over theworld. The militant spirit was received in unexpected places. Transmitted indirect-ly into the ludic youth cultures of the un- and under-employed, it altered the band-width of class struggles outside the workplace, as well as inside it, with subversivedemands for a dignified life without harassment. It is no longer possible to ignorethat insights derived from those traditions do not always connect with the experi-ences and understanding of younger people or with the vision of African and Asiansettlers whose colonial and post-colonial sufferings have been necessarily different.The Rastafari have gone and the Rude Boys are back in force. Some of them arenow girls and some of them are white.

The delicate and special dynamics of wh at used to be called afro-asian unityno longer color strategy or analyses in the same manner. The old racist myths ofAsian passivity, homogeneity, and cerebral malevolence have been laid to welcomerest. The burial of that orientalist baggage has taken place amidst a comprehensiveexploration of the identities, histories, and memories that might define the bound-aries of newly emergent ethno-political communities understandably ambivalentabout locating themselves inside the discourse of raciality if they have a chance toescape it. The racial idea of Asian has, for example, been broken down and enu-merated into a multiplicity of regional, religious, and other cultural fractions. It istrue that manythough by no means allvoices raised from within these diversegroups do not recognize themselves in the powerfully empty and possibly anachro-


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was a phenomenon of assertive decolonization now in retreat. Its defeat is also con-nected to wider cultura l shifts like the rise of identity politics, corporate multi-cul-ture,and an imploded, narcissistic obsession with the m inutiae ofethnicity.The his-toric turn away from the simpler efficacy of Blacknessa bridging term that hadpromoted vernacular cosmopolitan conversation and synchronized action amongthe victimizedcannot be separated from the pursuit of more complex and highlydifferentiated ways of fixing and instrumentalizing culture and difference. Thesedevelopments have made anti-racism less politically focused and more difficult toorganize, if not impossible. They are not only more likely to be in tune with anunderstan ding of rac e that derives from diversified market relations, but havealso helped to re-specify ethnicity exclusively in the contentious cultural terms oflife-style and consumer preference.The end of armed anti-colonial resistance, particularly in Africa, challengedanti-racist movements in the overdeveloped countries to find new sources of moti-vation, to invent a new political analysis and a morally informed vision of equalitythat did not derive its ethical credentials from the defeat of the Th ird Reich and theovercoming of Apartheid.It is easier now to define these historical dynamics in relation to the global-ization of Black politics, and to see how, with the demise of those low-intensitywars, the pan-Africanism of solidarity and the pan-Africanism of return have bothbeen stalled. We must now address the possibility that the political and economic

interests of Black and other minority people inside the citadels of overdevelopmentmay diverge from the agenda being defined by those outside the gates, who dwellwith scarcity.The diasporic movement of the 1970s was formed in the coordinates of anEastASC^est geometry of power. The inability to move it beyond nineteenth-centurynation-building paradigms focused by territorial sovereignty towards new modes ofnetworked connection and synchronized action expresses something urgent andimportan t that is not hmited to the global politics of race.In an arrangement that seems to typify the com bination of perplexity and iner-tia shared by many similar inter- and trans-national formations, the fading energiesof this arrested movement have been diverted. They are now deployed to inspirepost-modern simulations of the political and cultural connections that had definedanti-imperialist political projects in the early years of the twentieth century.^ It hasbeen disastrous that the vocal Western-hemisphere movement of slave descendantshas not, for the most part, been able to admit contemporary Africa's ecological,medical, and military emergencies into its conceptions of the present.Things were different when Ethiopianism and Garveyism, rather than Afro-centrism and occultism, set the tone. Then, to contain modernity, to appreciate itscolonial constitution, and to criticize its reliance on racialized governmental codes

all required finding an auton omous space outside ofit The desire to exist elsewherewas a governing impulse. There is no longer, however, any uncontaminated, pas-


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Race is Ordinary 9

Comparable investments in the restorative power of the pseudo-archaic occurelsewhere. They help to transform Harry Potter's anachronistic suburban worldinto a magical place, and are routine features of much new age thinking . Theygovern the quest for a repudiation of modernity that is shared by the various ver-sions of Islam that have largely eclipsed Ethiopianism as the principal spiritualresource and wellspring of critique among young Black Europeans.

Their desire to find an exit from consumerism's triumphant phantasmagoriareveals them to be bereft, adrift without the guidance they would have absorbedfrom the nationa l liberation m ovements of the cold war period and the struggles forboth civil and human rights with which they were connected. Instead, an America-centered, consumer-oriented culture of Blackness has become prominent in thispost-colonial setting. It conditions the dreams of many young Britons, irrespectiveof their ancestral origins or physical appearance. This brash and celebratory impe-rial formation is embarrassed by the geo-political fault-line that re-divides theworld, opposing the overdeveloped north to the suffering south. That barrier pro-vides the defining element in a new topography of global power, which is makingnew dem ands upon the overwhelmingly na tional character of civil society and idealof national citizenship.Creative and negative thinking is needed to generate more complex and chal-lenging narratives that can be faithful to the everyday patterns of heteroculturalmetropolitan life by reducing the exaggerated dimensions of racial difference to aliberating ordinary-ness. From this angle, rac e is nothing special, a virtual reali-ty given meaning only by the fact that racism endures. These overdue revisionsremain remote. The crude, dualistic architecture of racial discourse stubbornly mil-itates against their appearance.

Given the extent of deepening economic and social divisions, it is perhaps sur-prising that the convivial metropolitan cultures of the country's young people arestill a bulwark against the machinations of racial politics. This enduring quality ofresistance among the young is no trivial matter. It is much more than an effect ofmulti-cultural consumerism and communicates something of the irrevocablychanged conditions in which factors of identity and solidarity that derive fromclass, gender, sexuality, and region have made a strong sense of racial differenceunthinkable to the point of absurdity. The fact that so many British youth havebeen delivered to a place, as Nitin Sawhney mem orably puts it, beyond sk in com-municates how much those critical formations have changed. Electronic dancemusic, almost always without words, has been a dominant form during most ofthese years. Its technological base and its metropolitan conditions of existence havepromoted a spontaneous and ordinary hybridity that has been alloyed with recre-ational drug use on an extraordinary scale. Racism is still enacted but is largelydevoid of any strong belief in integral races. The resulting sub-cultures have lostnearly all of their old political flavors. They have been partially annexed by corpo-rate power and exported around the globe without anyone associated with either


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4 hilosophiaAfricana

ments that have transformed Britain into a post-modern society resting unsteadilyupon the ugly twin pillars of celebrity and charity. Apart from agonizing about thefundamental importance of the nation s currency to its fragile collective identity, theidea of Britain s nat ional interest has been systematically disassociated from every-day life. It is confined instead to the domain of global geo-politics, in which thecountry s dwindling fund of prestige can be seen to be immediately at stake.Schools, hospitals, and transportion are seldom seen as national assets, sources ofcollective pride, or expressions of popular and democratic sovereignty. They areonly appendages of the market that drain the national purse and confirm thenation s reduced circumstances now that the family silver has been flogged off. Thesystematic privatization of these important public institutions has led to their even-tual withdrawal from the scope of national consciousness. This has altered thecharacter and urgency of nationalist discourse. We can hardly be surprised whennationahsm assumes xenophobic, belligerent, and mihtaristic forms, for example,around the spectator sports that have provided such dubious assistance to the ideaof cultural integration.

It is not, as many commentators suggest, that the presence of immigrants cor-rodes the homogeneity and solidarity that are necessary to the cohesion and mutu-ality of authentically social-democratic regimes, but rather that, in their flight fromsocialist principles and welfare state inclusivity, these beleaguered regimes have pro-duced strangers and aliens as the limit against which increasingly evasive nationalparticularity can be seen, measured, and then, if need be, negatively discharged. Itshould be emphasized that the raw material for this perilous exercise is not suppliedby aging representatives of the incoming generation. Rather, it is supplied by thetwo succeeding generations of their locally born descendants w ho are trapped in thevulnerable role of perpetual outsider but nevertheless have a sense of entitlementthat makes them reluctant to seek common cause with refugees and asylum seek-ers.

I want to turn now to the presence of British citizens among the hooded andchained al-Qaida prisoners in Caribbean d etention, which has been baffling to mostcommentators on the September 11 attacks and their aftermath. Civilizationismand culturalist racism alike dictate that these evil people have reverted to culturaltype. The iron logic of ethnic absolutism comprehends their affiliation to funda-mentalism not as choice or will but as an instinctive response to the combinedweight of history, tradition, and bio-cultural continuity. Politically, their perversetenure of British citizenship becomes a retroactive indictment of overly lax immi-gration control and nationality legislation in the past.

They are among us, but they are not of us . At w orst, their presence is likely tohave been the illegitimate result of the arranged marriages that define their other-ness. At best, their treacherous choices will remain a private and spiritual matterdisconnected from the patterns of everyday life inside Britain. Their sham funda-mentalism is no more or less alien than was their misguided introduction into this


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Race is Ordinary 4

This hollow common sense makes young Europeans' enthusiasm for politicalIslam nothing whatever to do with domestic relations or domestic racism, or withpolicing, schooling, prison, and the labor market. Last summer's rioting in Britain'snorthern industrial towns was ventriloquized to communicate the same duplicitousand facile order of readily racialized truths. Then, the rioters rioted because theywere alien. The proof of that alien-ness was the fact that they rioted.

New thinking is needed that can take this discussion beyond the residual cat-egories of the outmoded 1960s debate on rac e. Politicians are not even preparedto acknowledge that two generations have passed since anybody in government satdown and tried to make sense of the politics of race in Britain. They identify aresponse to profound and militant disenchantment among these young British peo-ple in the litany of ever more elaborate citizenship pledges and obligatory languagetraining. Those measures will do nothing to address the conditions that have pro-duced routine disaffection and exceptional treachery.

The idea tha t a significant number of the men likely to be indicted as membersof Bin Laden's international terrorist conspiracy have enjoyed intimate post-colo-nial connections with Black London life needs to be considered carefully. The storyof Black European involvement in these geopolitical currents can be connected to thehistory of immigration and race politics in deeper and more disturbing ways.Zacarias Moussaoui, the twentieth hijacker, is routinely described as a Erench cit-izen of Moroccan ancestry, but he lived in London for nine years and completed hiseducation at South Bank University in the vernacular cosmopolitan space of the Ele-phan t and Castle. The network that connects him to R ichard Reid, the hapless, gigan-tic Shoebom ber, encompasses Paris, Brussels, and Am sterdam as well as London.We know that, like Reid, he worshiped at the Brixton mosque that seems to havebeen a key point connecting the routine frustrations and hatreds of people madeangry and miserable by white supremacy to the balm of a fundamentalist Utopia.

Twenty years before, a lost and damaged young man like Richard Reid mighthave found comfort and sustenance in a different political, philosophical, and cul-tural system. At that point, globalizing Ethiopianism and R astafari livity still plau-sibly combined indictments of imperialism with the restorative rhetoric of Blackpower. The ascetic Rastafari spoke the language of peace and love and the languageof rights and justice, though not in a liberal accent. At the end of the Cold War, theyheld provocatively to the fundamental unity of humankindsomething that couldonly be recovered and made useful if the destructive power of racism could beacknowledged and repaired. There would be wars until the color of skin was of nomore significance than the color ofeyes. But once southern Africa was liberated, itwas clear that the Rastafari would not be waging it.The later eighties and nineties saw the poetic eschatology of the Caribbeanbasin succeeded by a much more self-consciously militant and militaristic approach

to Black solidarity. This time it was the obvious product of the overdevelopedworld. A hip-hop mentality derived from American apartheid and addressed to


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longer to be incompatible with the long-term goal of racial uplift.Eor many, the mainstreaming of Black culture was a shift that tainted and

compromised the very core of Black resistance. Erom then on, America's Afro-Bap-tist pieties were an inducement to surrender, rather than revolution. It was Islam,rather than Christianity, that would supply the patch of solid ground on whichpost-modern Black nationalism could plant its expensively-shod ideological feet.Willing to break the hold of American-centered thought, but unable to turnentirely from its racial phantasmagoria, the austere and authoritarian versions ofBlack nationalism peddled in Black London's underground turned in the directionof America's own versions of pseudo-fundamentalist Islam. Eantasies of nationalrebirth were lubricated by the opportunistic wisdom of figures such as Black Amer-ica's self-styled tru th terro rist Khalid M uha mmad.A highly selective appropriation of Islamic motifs assisted in developing asce-tic and communitarian responses to nihilism, violence, and consumerism. ThisIslam was leavened with diverse occult and new age themes. In the best protestantfashion, it soon turned inwards and helped the desire to re-make the world take sec-ond place behind the obligation to re-make oneself Power was exercised in evermore narrow circuits: over one's own body at the gym and, above all, in the regu-lation of interpersonal conduct between men and women, between parents andchildren.America was initially thrilled and horrified to be told that John Walker Lindh

it's very own wigger Talib was a suburban hip hopper from an affluent Cali-fornian family w ho was turned into a Muslim fanatic through over-exposure to theprison conversion autobiography of Malcolm X. The idea of contamination byBlackness is an old script. It qualifies his image as a traitor with layers of psycho-logical confusion. With his primal identity on the line. Walker started to becomeintelligible once we discovered that his father, Erank Lindh, had abandoned hismother for another man. Walker's acts became comprehensible within the rules ofa corrupted family romance.Though Richard Reid's estranged parents have also been prominent in anational quest for an explana tion of his condu ct, his less pampered life tells an alto -gether different sort of tale as deeply English as Walker's is American. More thanthe antics of those maimed Mullahs now active in the shadow s of the Arsenal andelsewhere, Richard Reid has been used to manifest the uncomfortable truth thatBritish multiculturalism has failed. His place in history has already been assured,not by his ideological commitments or his almost comical ineptitude, but by thebizarre instruments of his failed martyrdom: the sophisticated training-shoe bombstha t enclosed his gigantic clown-sized feet.Those iconic feet matter of course. In the context of all the simplistic rubbishthat has been spouted about his racially mixed parentage, they have been made to

bear the all the weight of nineteenth-cen tury theories of hybrid vigor. Like his enor-mous body, those feet not only confirm Reid's essential monstrosity, but also rep-


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ce is Ordinary 4

ty half-castes such as Sade, Scary Spice, and Ryan Giggs. They say tha t ratherthan being a routine and essentially banal feature of contemporary British life, racemixing is another misguided social experiment that can only end in catastrophicviolence.Eor more than thirty years, the core logic of British racial thinking specifiedthat the social and political problems embodied in the invasive presence of immi-grants and their kin are an intrusion, an alien wedge cutting into the body of anunsuspecting nation. This is why Britain's Black settlers were always immigrantsand why recent talk of refugees and asylum seekers remains saturated with tracesof racial discourse regardless of the wholesome intention to place these discussionson a post-powellite footing.Today the traditional desire to push immigration outside dovetails neatly withthe new mood that fixes the interpretation of September 11 horrors and their ongo-ing aftermath as a clash of civilizations and their mutually incompatible culturalsystems. Whatever the demographics of pension provision and negative populationgrowth may communicate, there is a powerful warning here for would-be architectsof the coun try's coffee colo red future: a cat born in a kipper box will nonethe-less remain a cat.The vivid tabloid accounts of the Reid family's fortunes over several genera-tions support this default view of the relationship between race culture and socialpathology. Erom that angle, the seeds of Richard's recent tragedy were sown longago by Hubert Reid, his migrating Jamaican grandfather. It is with the figures of hisestranged father, Robin, a wretched specimen of the tragic mulatto type, seeminglyplucked from the Victorian depths of Enoch Powell's worst nightmare, and hismother Lesley Hughes, a white Englishwoman who attracts sympathy by havingmade a mistake twenty-eight years ago, that things get serious and all the damagedone to Britain by post-war immigration becomes apparent.

Mrs. Hughes had the presence of mind to divorce her disreputable Black hus-band and flee to the countryside. Erom her rural home, she looked with palpablehorror towards the bad behavior of the long-lost child who, like Victor Eranken-stein's hideous and equally unnatural offspring, had chosen a path of destruction asits compensation for exile from kith and kin.Bravely resisting the pressure to make failed family life into the overall expla-nation of his son's treachery, Robin Reid offered an eloquent counter-analysis ofboth their blighted lives. The various effects of British racism were cited repeated-ly as he tried to create an emotional and psychological context in which his son'sperplexing political choices might be suddenly comprehensible. London-bornRobin's words were undermined by our knowledge that, like his son, he too hasbeen a criminal. He revealed that he had spent 18 of his 51 years behind bars fornumerous minor offenses. Though he has managed to go straight for the last eightyears,his bad character was confirmed in the press by the fact that he has been liv-ing on government benefits during all of that time. These details tied his personal


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Philosophia Africana

Though acknowledging his failure as a father, Robin Reid refused to identifythat shortcoming as the key to his son's fate. He claimed credit for introducing theboy to the Islamic faith that he, Uke Malcolm X , had discovered while in prison andused subsequently as an antidote to the racism that bound and broke his hopes.Robin Reid says firmly that he found refuge from that same racism in the fraterni-ty provided to him by the Hells Angels wh o, like the Islamic bro therhood tha t too kin his errant son, did not care abou t rac e or color. The historic tension betweenthe claims of communities we choose and those into which we are born has seldombeen more starkly stated.

Britain's jails are brimful with Richard Reids. The largely unacknowledgedeffects of institutional racism have polluted the waters of its civic culture. Demon-ic images of Reid and his peers will doubtless help to erase the limited yet positivecontribution made by the Macpherson report. But analysis that fails to takeEurope's post-colonial conflicts into account will not be able to explain why youngBlack Europeans might find fundamentalism attractive or be willing to hitch theirhopes for a world without racism to the absurd engine of an Islamic revolution.New Labour's recent attempts to recreate a party-political consensus over race and immigration by waging tabloid war on refugees and asylum seekershave helped produce the perilous situation in which we now find ourselves. It is thegovernment that is cynical, not the electorate it insults on those grounds. Howevermuch ministers protest to the contrary, it is obvious that they are actively complic-

it in the strategy of using a tough line on rac e to send nods and winks to the goodburgers of middle England, reassuring them that whatever they have heard aboutStephen Lawrence and institutional racism, when it comes to turning back the alientide of refugees and asylum seekers, it's business as usual.Once the consumerist values of neo-hberalism are factored into this picture,we may be misled by the fact that Black Britons can benefit from the love of exot-ica that arises as a response to the demands of living with difference, of being withthe Other. This confusion is compounded when glamorous and unfamiliar culturescan be consumed in the absence of any face-to-face recognition or real-time nego-tiations with their actual creators. But that desire for what was formerly stigma-tized and forbidden can also be interpreted as yet another symptom of the collapseof English cultural confidence that has fed the development of anxious and insecurelocal and national identities. Today's hatreds and violence arise less than they didin the past, from supposedly reliable anthropological knowledge of the stable iden-tity and predictable difference of the Other. Their novel sources lie in the problemof not being able to locate the Other's difference in the common-sense lexicon ofalterity. Different people are still hated and feared, but the timely antipathy againstthem is nothing compared to the hatreds turned towards the greater menace of thehalf-different and the partially familiar. To have mixed is to have been party to a

great civilizationai betrayal. Any unsettling traces of the resulting hybridity musttherefore be excised from the tidy, bleached-out zones of an impossibly pure cul-


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Race is Ordinary 45

etary hum anism. The newness of tha t mentality resides precisely in the ways that itis systematically opened to the difficult work of understand ing how race-think-ing configured and distorted the exclusionary humanisms of the past. The detourthrough modern histories of suffering is mandatory. It provides an invaluablemeans to locate ethical and political principles that can guide the work of buildingmore just and equitable social relations. This is not anti-racism of the type that sayswe must learn to love and value human differences rather than fear and misrecog-nize them. It is a new project because it is prepared to break with the notion thatracial differences are a self-evident, immutable fact of political life. It refuses theidea that that this order of difference is somehow necessary to the very stability ofour conflicted world. Instead, it suggests that the reification of race must be chal-lenged if effective work against racism is to be accomplished. It seeks to turn thetables on purity-seekers, whoever they may be, to force them to account for theirphobia about otherness and their violent hostility in the face of the clanging,selfevident sameness of suffering humankind. The version of multi-culturalism takingshape at this point is not a lifestyle option. Its dissident value is confirmed every-where in the chaotic pleasures of the post-colonial urban world.

These arguments were also born from a desire to make it as easy for people toimagine a world without racial differences as it is for them currently to imagine theend of the world. The commitment to being recognized as a Black European that itproclaims is hopefully part of a larger transition that may take us beyond racializedand racializable categories of all kinds. If it is currently impossible to acquire or evenimagine tha t variety of post-e thnic European identity, then that state of affairs isnot only a result of the racism that still blocks the paths towards belonging, but alsoof the enduring pow er of racial identities as such. With the examples of the post-colo-nial metropolis and its hybrid cultures on our side, I suspect that we will do a betterjob of fighting racism if we are able to weaken their claims upon us.

Historical analyses of racial hierarchy that overflow the fading boundaries ofnation-states are essential to the credibility of this adventurous project. Theabortive discussions begun at the 2001 Durban conference on racism and otherforms of inequality (shut down prematurely in the aftermath of the terrorist attackson New York) may yet prove to be the beginning of a truly global opportunity todebate the damage that rac e and racism have done to democracy and hope alike.We do not know where this planetary conversation will take us or even whether theconcept of racism will ultimately be an adequate vehicle for the cosmopolitan his-tories of hierarchy and inequality we will need.

NOTES1. Cm 4262-1 February 1999.2. Nick Hornby's novels can be introduced here. The passages inHigh idelitywhere


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