Post-racial paradoxes: rethinking European racism and anti-racism

Patterns of Prejudice

ISSN: 0031-322X (Print) 1461-7331 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpop20

Post-racial paradoxes: rethinking European racism and anti-racism S. Sayyid To cite this article: S. Sayyid (2017) Post-racial paradoxes: rethinking European racism and anti-racism, Patterns of Prejudice, 51:1, 9-25, DOI: 10.1080/0031322X.2016.1270827 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2016.1270827

Published online: 26 Jan 2017.

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Date: 26 January 2017, At: 04:17

Patterns of Prejudice, 2017 Vol. 51, No. 1, 9–25, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2016.1270827

Post-racial paradoxes: rethinking European racism and anti-racism

S. SAYYID

The advent of a post-racial understanding of racism has changed the way in which Europe sees itself and its ethnic minorities. The concept of the post-racial emerged in the United States to describe a belief that America was no longer a racist society and the election of Barack Obama to the highest office in the land was a public and highly visible confirmation of that state of affairs. A global post-racial culture has taken hold of western plutocracies in which racism is universally denounced but increasingly difficult to pin down. Sayyid’s study, by using a decolonial analytics, examines the different ways in which racism is imagined and how this imagination shapes the way in which the post-racial appears. The paper goes on to sketch out an alternative account of the post-racial as an aspect of the various trends that have been described as being post-political.

ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS anti-racism, critical race theory, decoloniality, political, post-political, postracial, racism

J

acques Derrida famously—perhaps rather grumpily—rebuked an interviewer: ‘Deconstruction the way I understand it doesn’t produce any sitcom, and if a sitcom is this and this, and the people who watch this and think that Deconstruction is this, the only advice I have to give them is to just read, stop watching sitcoms, and try and do your own homework and read.’1 This admonishment was directed at an interviewer who tried to link the popular tagline of Seinfeld—a show about nothing—with deconstruction.2 Seinfeld, which aired from 1989 to 1998, is often considered to be a seminal television sitcom. The show is centred on a group of four white New Yorkers, living in what now can be described as the interregnum between the end of the Cold War and the launching of the war on terror. The show can be seen as a self-knowing and self-absorbed comedy of manners, in the context of 1

2

Derrida, dir. Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering (New York: Zeitgeist Films, 2002). For the screenplay, see Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, Derrida: Screenplay and Essays on the Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2005). To be fair to Derrida, the Australian reporter probably provoked his ire because her question seemed to demonstrate a knowledge neither of deconstruction (that is, deconstruction is not about nothing) or of Seinfeld, which is also not about nothing but highly textured and tightly plotted with series of overlapping arcs.

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

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an absence of a received etiquette.3 The show’s humour and (perhaps) popularity hinged on this quest for order in a cosmopolitan landscape in which history had come to an end. The four principal characters in Seinfeld can be read as representing a comedic iteration of Nietzsche’s last man. They navigate metropolitan life without any noble purpose or strong passion or ambition. An aspect of the show is the way in which the characters are comfortable with ethnic diversity, manifest in cuisine, and the people they meet in their ‘adventures’. Seinfeld has a certain literacy in relation to anti-racism to the extent that its programme-makers feel they can play with it. There is a scene in an episode of Seinfeld, however, that, while having nothing to do with deconstruction per se, may have something to show us about the possibility of a certain (un-Derridean) kind of deconstructive understanding of contemporary racism. Jerry:

Kramer: Jerry: Kramer:

Jerry: Kramer: Jerry: Kramer:

Jerry:

So you won’t believe what happened with Whatley today. It got back to him that I made this little dentist joke and he got all offended. Those people can be so touchy. Those people, listen to yourself. What? You think that dentists are so different from me and you? They came to this country just like everybody else, in search of a dream. Kramer, he’s just a dentist. Yeah, and you’re an anti-dentite. I am not an anti-dentite! You’re a rabid anti-dentite! Oh, it starts with a few jokes and some slurs. ‘Hey, denty!’ Next thing you know you’re saying they should have their own schools. They do have their own schools!4

This exchange illustrates with great acuity some of the main themes that this paper will explore. It is an exchange that is possible because it assumes a close affinity with the logics of racism; it is able to turn on how racism rests on the formation of collective identity of a particular kind and the assumed antipathy such identity is likely to attract. It is not ‘deconstruction’ as simply a baroque synonym for critique, it certainly is not about nothing, it is clearly about the undecidable relationship between identity and antagonism as expressed in the popular idiom of post-racial race-talk. There are a number of occasions when Seinfeld flirts with the post-racial, but the 3 4

For a contrary view, see Robert Epperson, ‘Seinfeld the moral life’, in William Irwin (ed.), Seinfeld and Philosophy (Chicago: Open Court 2000), 170. ‘The yada yada’, Seinfeld, dir. Andy Ackerman, season 8, episode 19, broadcast on NBC, 24 April 1997.

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emergence of ‘anti-dentism’ is perhaps the most blatant illustration of this phenomenon.5 The writers and presumed audience of the show seemingly understand the key tropes of racism, and they understand that racism is something that is worthy of condemnation.6 A popular sitcom may not tell us much about deconstruction per se, but a television programme repeated thousands of times in hundreds of cities across the globe is a useful index of its broad cultural effects.7 The writers are able to mobilize this critique of racism, the sense in which the viewing public knows how racism operates, and to expand to include populations that are not traditionally part of racism’s repertoire. The expansion of the category of racism to cover ‘anti-dentite’ is not, as I will argue in this paper, just another example of conceptual inflation that has attended the theorization and circulation of the categories of race and racism. Rather I want to argue that the comedic inclusion an ‘anti-dentitism’ within the family of racism is an illustration of the post-racial condition. Initially, I want to use the post-racial to describe a strategic situation not in which racism has been eliminated or even put under sous erature, but rather a situation in which the tension between a condemnation of racism and its continued perpetuation and practice is contained. For example, in the recent past, European xenophobic parties have had little compunction in declaring themselves to be racist, a sensibility that they have shared with a broad range of political opinion. In recent years, the same parties (often staffed by many of the same party members) now refuse the designation ‘racist’.8 This avoidance of the designation ‘racist’ creates a number of problems for anti-racists. When nobody calls themselves racist, the temptation not to treat racism as a form of false consciousness is hard to resist, since, without individuals and institutions 5

6

7

8

There is also an episode in which Elaine, one of the regulars in the series, is dating someone in the belief that he is biracial—he is also dating Elaine in the assumption that she is biracial—when in fact apparently neither of them are. The boundaries of this culture are not purely national, since a sitcom like Seinfeld is shown widely throughout the world and, while its writers are focused on New York sensibilities, these sensibilities have the ability to transcend the metropolitan confines of New York. This global Americanization has influenced not only patterns of consumption (Coca Cola, McDonald’s), entertainment (Hollywood, pop music) and also visions of the world (neoliberalism). The American position in the world rests not only on its military might but also on what Joseph Nye describes as soft power, the ability to change preferences not through coercion or its threat, but through attraction and emulation. The critique of racism can be seen as being part of US soft power. For example, Nigel Farage, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, which has campaigned on an anti-immigration platform, took exception to being described as racist, and argued that anti-immigration was not meant to be anti-immigrant, and was certainly not racist. This principled rejection of racism went hand-inhand with frequent and regular appearance of the tropes associated with racism: for example, Nigel Farage found the absence of voices speaking in English on his suburban train journey uncomfortable. See Andrew Sparrow, ‘Nigel Farage: parts of Britain are “like a foreign land”’, Guardian, 24 February 2014.

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that self-identify as racist, it is difficult to marshal the elements that constitute racism. Thus, without racists, racism becomes a phantasmagoria. Racism is everywhere and thus it is nowhere, its generalization and lack of specificity means that its capacity to provide an analytical leverage has been lost, and its use as an instrument of justice has been weakened. We are told all racists are bad, but we don’t really know any racists. This disjunction between racism and racists opens a horizon by which it becomes possible to imagine something like ‘anti-dentism’ becoming part of the family of the racially excluded. (For example, there have been moves to recognize people with red (that is, ginger) hair as a discriminated group.9) What this transformation signals is not just confusion or conceptual inflation of the category of racism but its reconfiguration. This paper argues that not only is the post-racial a useful concept that can help us to analyse the racist logics at play in contemporary conjuncture but also, more importantly, that a theorization of the post-racial allows us to overhaul (if not deconstruct) the dominant understanding of racism. It is built around a series of reflections organized in three parts. First, I sketch out the conventional account of racism as a way of problematizing and retaining the concept of racism. Second, I discuss how the post-racial appears in the culture of the global North in general not as a phenomenon that affects ethnically marked populations but rather how it is central to the articulation of a new global historic bloc. Third, the paper will reflect on the relationship between the post-racial and the post-political against the background of a new historic bloc.

Racism and anti-racism The emergence of racism as a category does not mark the beginning of the conceptualization of practices and protocols that are now associated with it. The word ‘racism’ emerged in the 1930s; its earliest coinage was as a title of a book by Magnus Hirschfeld, published in German in 1934 and translated into English in 1938.10 ‘Racism’ was used to describe the experience of the people of Jewish heritage living under the discriminatory laws imposed by the newly elected Nazi government. From 1933 onwards, the measures introduced included restrictions on employment (such as the 1933 Law on the Admission to the Legal Profession), education (such as the 1933 Law against Overcrowding in Schools and Universities) and citizenship (such as the 1935 Nuremberg Race Laws). It is often pointed out that the category of racism was a response to the policies of the Nazis. It is less often queried why the policies of Nazis required the invention of the concept of racism. Finlo Rorher, ‘Is gingerism as bad as racism?’, BBC News (online), 6 June 2007, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/6725653.stm (viewed 2 November 2016). 10 See Robert Miles, Racism (London: Routledge 1989), 42.

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The various techniques associated with Nazi rule (including those of social exclusion, segregation and marginalization) were already operating under European colonial rule (in empires such as those of the British, French and Dutch but also the ‘inner’ empires in which European settlers confronted indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australasia). Concentration camps, discriminatory legal codes and semi-official systems of violation, none of these were new to Europeans or the exclusive innovation of the Nazis. What was new was the category of racism, not the practice of racism. Or, to be precise, the panoply of practices and protocols already circulating did not require so much a theorization that would bring them to the fore but, rather, an annexation by which means the category of racism would take over other ways of describing those phenomena. It would do by so by ignoring the continuities that many saw between Nazism and colonialism. Continuities that ranged from Hitler comparing his plans to rule Eastern Europe with the rule of the British in India. Continuities that the ranks of those subject to European rule were quick to note. Continuities that the category of racism disrupted and disavowed. Thus, from its inception, racism was a contested concept, with a wide gap between the category and the phenomena. It is precisely this contested nature, this division between the signifier ‘racism’ and its signified that opens the possibility for a politics of racism. I would argue that the category of racism announced the politics of racism and that this is the strongest reason why it is useful to hold on to, despite its problematic nature. For it is the politics of racism that provides a platform for anti-racism. The struggle for the meaning of racism is locked in the possibility of the scale and morphology of anti-racism. To make good on this claim, I want to outline the main imaginaries that seek to close the gap between the signifier ‘racism’ and its signifieds. The description of racist’s practices and behaviours requires a causal narrative that explains the existence of racism. The literature explaining racism is immense and much disputed. For the purpose of my argument, I do not offer a detailed review but rather an outline of the main imaginaries by which racism is deployed: racism as fate, racism as exceptional, and racism as colonialism.

Racism as fate The idea that racism is necessary is most easily associated with a discourse that traces its origins to causes deep in the human make-up. Racism is disclosed in these accounts as having an almost universal validity arising from the way in which antipathy to strangers is considered to be natural and universal. This antipathy is explained as being a rational response to uncertainty, or it is rationalized by extrapolating the violence of species like chimpanzees.11 11 Ian Morris, War: What Is It Good For? The Role of Conflict in Civilisation, from Primates to Robots (London: Profile Books 2014).

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The argument that racism is locked at least in the Palaeolithic past of humankind (regardless of the mechanism of this locking) continues to be a position that enjoys a great deal of support. There may be a difference between those who see the transmission of racial characteristics as being primarily conducted through the mechanism of biology and those who see cultural practices as being primary in this transmission. There is a sense of immutability involved in the designation of race that differentiates its ontological principles from other ways of grouping humans. Whether this immutability is seen as based on an essence that is permanent, or a kernel that is fixed over the longue durée, it is clear that the category of ‘race’ (or its cognates) gestures towards a set of characteristics and commitments that are impervious to voluntary transformations: in other words, a person cannot choose their race. What remains nebulous, however, is the relationship between race and racism. For one set of arguments, the dissolution of race must axiomatically lead to the dissolution of racism, since the practice and beliefs associated with racism are predicated on the division of humanity into races and the reorganization of these races into a violent and violating hierarchy. In a weaker version of this argument, the mobilization of the signifier ‘race’ is necessary to generate racism. Regardless of the version used, it is the phenomenon of race that constitutes racism.

Racism as exceptional The rhetoric that racism is exceptional, the product of extraordinary hostility, finds its expression in Nazism as a template of what constitutes racism.12 This approach also uses revulsion at the violence of the Nazis, and the defeat of the Nazi order, to leverage political capital against discriminatory practices directed at various ethnically marked populations in Europe. Racism can be explained by the actions of dedicated, organized racists whose beliefs and values, and very often iconography, echo those of the Nazis. The idea that Nazism was an aberration, and had no analogue with European colonial rule, enabled white privilege to continue as the ordering principle of the western world even after the defeat of Nazism in the Second World War. Anti-colonial critics, however, had less difficulty in seeing continuities between the racial rule that the Nazi regime enforced over large parts of Europe and the racial rule that western states maintained over large parts of the world than the defenders of white privilege. The existential nature of National Socialism’s confrontation with liberal-imperial assemblages of the British, French and Dutch empires did much to produce the conditions in which racism (as practiced by the Nazis) began to lose its 12 Barnor Hesse and S. Sayyid, ‘Narrating the postcolonial political and the immigrant imaginary’, in N. Ali, V. S. Kalra and S. Sayyid (eds), A Postcolonial People: South Asians in Britain (New York: Columbia University Press 2008), 13–31.

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legitimacy.13 To maintain that racism is the product of Nazism requires the disarticulation of Nazism from the rest of the western patrimony, be it in the field of eugenics or the field of imperial violence. The common segregation along racial lines of the British Empire, Nazi Germany and the United States, for example, is simply written out of popular (and not so popular) cultural representations. The denunciation of racism is part of the (retrospective) reconstruction of the meaning of the defeat of Nazism. The defeat of Nazi Germany was one of the major factors that enabled the marginalization of antisemitism in post-war Europe and the re-articulation of the Jewish presence in European history as intrinsic rather than alien. The now popular formulation of Judaeo-Christian identification began to circulate with greater frequency and regularity. Judaeo-Christian culture became the foundation of the western cultural enterprise.14 The Jewish experience was increasingly coupled with the Christian, and Jews were considered to be part and parcel of the western experience. This was in direct challenge to the way in which Nazi discourse articulated Jews, and the Jewish cultural experience, as being antithetical to the West. The construction Semite v. Aryan that one could find in authoritative non-polemical academic accounts (for example, the first edition of The Cambridge Ancient History series, published between 1919 and 1926) began to unravel in the western plutocracies as ‘Aryan’ become a signifier not so much of whiteness but rather of the Nazi enunciation of white privilege.15 The dissolution of the category Aryan subverted the utility of the signifier ‘Semite’. The anti-antisemitic discourse that emerged was based on a number of moves that sought to dissolve the categories that made that discourse possible. This involved the reminder that ‘Semitic’ and ‘Aryan’ referred to language families not human groupings; in other words, a separation between the speakers of a language and the language itself was introduced. The process was further extended as modern linguistics began to use a different nomenclature to describe languages, and disassociate them from ‘races’. A similar move was made by the way biologists were interpreted to demonstrate that races did not exist, discrediting Nazi race science and very idea of race itself. While all these developments had their own internal logics, it is difficult to dismiss the impact of the horror of the Holocaust and the defeat of the Third Reich, which permitted and encouraged elaborate differentiation between the system that came to end with the total military defeat of National Socialism and the victorious West shorn of its commonalties with Nazism. 13 George M. Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2002); Barnor Hesse, ‘Racism’s alterity: the after-life of black sociology’, in Wulf D. Hund and Alana Lentin (eds), Racism and Sociology, Racism Analysis, Yearbook 5 (Münster and Berlin: LIT Verlag 2015), 141–74. 14 For a provocative articulation of an Islamo-Christian civilization as the bedrock of the modern world system, see Richard Bulliet, The Case for Islamo-Chrisitan Civilization (New York: Columbia University Press 1996). 15 Hesse, ‘Racism’s alterity’.

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Anti-racism as a response to these imaginaries of racism can appear either forlorn or heroic. In one reading, nothing can really be done about racism and different societies may express different forms of racism at different times. In another reading, the struggle against racism can be seen as another achievement of the West, demonstrating the emancipatory nature of the western enterprise. Racism is like other struggles initiated by the western enterprise to enhance freedom over our inherent programming and social conditioning. Thus the struggle against racism becomes analogous to struggles against the hierarchies of patriarchy, disability or sexual orientation. Western values and cultural practices are presented as being uniquely (if not always exclusively) suited to waging these struggles. This produces a broken kettle form of anti-racism in which the multiple arguments generate inconsistencies and undermine rather support the countering of racism.16

The post-racial and the global North These ways of representing racism provide the backdrop against which the various iterations of the post-racial emerge. Geographically and culturally the United States is proclaimed as the first post-racial western plutocracy. The idea of the post-racial in the United States was initially associated with the set of arguments articulated by a number of people of colour that showed how racism was disappearing. Many of the most obvious advocates of these arguments came from the relatively recent arrival to the United States of people with professional backgrounds from countries in which the language of elite instruction was English. Along with these professional Anglophonic immigrants, there were also a growing number of conservative African Americans. The appointment of figures such as Colin Powell as Joint Chief of Staff, Condoleeza Rice as Secretary of State and (more controversially) Clarence Thomas as Supreme Court Justice by Republican administrations seemed to demonstrate that the American dream, with few minor detours, was alive and well. Thus the post-racial vision of America remained associated with commentary that was more or less neoconservative. The election of Barack Obama signalled the consolidation of neoconservativism as a new historic bloc.17 Until his election, it was possible to think that neoconservativism was a blip. Before 2008, the neoconservatives were often presented as a sinister cabal that had hijacked the American state and twisted its constitution out of shape, a situation that a subsequent election would correct. The post-racial was seen as a justification of neoconservative Blacks, and 16 See Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (London: Pelican Books 1976), 119–20. 17 This is a concept introduced by Antonio Gramsci to describe the complex relations between economy, culture and political forces that underpin a specific hegemony. For details, see Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. from the Italian by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart 1976), 181.

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African-American and other ethnically marked advocates of the post-racial could be seen in terms of collaborators and careerists. The election of Obama was a watershed moment: a country whose history was stained by the violence of racial rule became the first major western plutocracy with a black head of state. The election of Obama seemed to confirm the birth of a post-racial America. A post-racial America that both left and right could celebrate. As David Hollinger wrote, the election of Obama seemed to confirm ‘a possible future in which the ethnoracial categories central to identity politics would be more matters of choice than ascription; in which mobilization by ethnoracial groups would be more a strategic option than a presumed destiny attendant upon mere membership in a group; and in which economic inequalities would be confronted head-on, instead of through the medium of ethnorace’.18 A post-racial America was an America in which belonging to a ‘race’ was less and less significant in people’s lives. The idea of post-racial America began to be articulated throughout the western plutocracies, an assumption that liberal democracy was more than adequate to deal with the problem of racism. Whereas the development of a post-racial America was enabled by the emergence of a large middle class from the ranks of the ethnically marked and formerly excluded segments of the population, in the European Union the post-racial turn has had very different causes. While there is some evidence that, in many European countries with large and well-established postcolonial settlers, there is an emergence of an ethnically marked middle class, the scale of this embourgeoisement is not as significant as in the United States demographically, culturally or politically. As a consequence, post-racial advances in the European Union have not been as robust and therefore their success in opening up the bastions of white privilege have been far more limited.19 The proclamation of a post-racial Europe is driven by three main trends, some of which are shared with the United States and others are exclusive to European Union countries themselves. The first of these trends is the formation of a neoconservative historic bloc that spans both sides of the Atlantic. By historic bloc, I am referring to a configuration of ideologies, institutions and other social forces that span cultural and economic fields to shape and institutionalize a vision of the world and an individual and social comportment to it. Shorn of the residual economism of Gramsci’s original account, historic bloc provides a useful means for theorizing international governance. Rather than offering a national reading of the post-racial, I want to focus on the politics of racism as it is played out in an increasingly transnational arena. The neoconservative historic bloc is organized around the refrain that western culture and values play an axiomatically 18 David A. Hollinger, ‘The concept of post-racial: how its easy dismissal obscures important questions’, Daedalus, vol. 140, no. 1, 2011, 174–82 (176). 19 For description and elaboration of the concept of postcolonial ethnic minorities, see Hesse and Sayyid, ‘Narrating the postcolonial political and the immigrant imaginary’.

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progressive role in the world—and they must continue to play such a role— and those core values are based on free markets and free societies of free individuals. Racism is associated with restrictions on individual freedom, and the implication is that, by virtue of being democratic, western societies have stopped being racist. The second main influence on the development of a post-racial Europe is the way in which the Civil Rights Movement assumed a leading position in the emergence and dissemination of an anti-racist disposition. The historical impact of the Civil Rights Movement went beyond the borders of the United States to become the means by which anti-racism was articulated and developed. Thus the advent of a post-racial America (however contested, however denied) was bound to have an effect on the paradigm of race relations that emerged in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement and struggles. Soft power in the United State and the dominance of a Civil Rights-inspired anti-racist paradigm has helped advance the possibility of European societies in which ‘racial differences’ are considered to be less and less significant in the production of social conflict. In other words, the production of a post-racial society can be seen as a reflection of American soft power. According to this narrative, the American capacity for reform and the recovery of emancipatory possibilities inherent in western cultural values find another expression in the ability to overcome fundamental racial conflict and move towards a society in which the racial divide is no longer significant, except as a few residual and isolated incidents. The third main influence on the articulation of a post-racial Europe is the development of what has variously been described as a post-political rejection of politics. The post-political understands the current conjuncture as being characterized by the triumph of the western alliance in the Cold War and the consequent erosion of all substantive conflicts. This victory is seen not just in geopolitical terms but rather also in philosophical terms. There are various ways of describing this situation, perhaps the most influential being the thesis advanced by Francis Fukuyama (first presented as essay then as book) of the ‘end of history’.20 Fukuyama’s argument was that the fall of the Berlin Wall meant that the intellectual and ideological struggle that was symbolized by the existence of an alternative to capitalism (as represented by the Soviet Union) unravelled, leaving the world with no alternative but to accept the superiority of liberal economies and democratic societies for managing human affairs. The post-political vision was taken up by writers such as Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, who sought to flesh out the end of history by proposing that we understand the current world as being increasingly organized ways in which collective identities are less and less significant for human existence, and more and more social life being organized around

20 Francis Fukuyama, ‘The end of history?’, National Interest, Summer 1989, 3–18; Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press 1992).

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well-informed (and well-intentioned) individuals.21 Neither Giddens nor Beck or any of the other writers most often associated with the post-political have had much to say about racism. The implication of the thrust of their argument is clear: the erosion of collective identities includes the replacement of ethnic blocs by individuals, and racism would only continue as a residual stain in societies of a new cosmopolitan order. There is clearly a large degree of overlap between the vision of a post-political cosmopolitan order and the idea associated with post-racial America; one of the main advocates of the post-racial pointed out that he used the term ‘post-racial’ (or ‘post-ethnic’) as a more concrete manifestation of what other writers were describing as being cosmopolitan.22 The elaboration of a post-racial Europe, while being less vocal than that of post-racial America, has however become part of the emerging commonsense around issues of racism, tolerance and multiculturalism in the European Union. It is the background to debates about how to manage postcolonial ethnic minorities. This background is found not only at the level of national debate among national political figures and opinion-makers, but also at the level of the banality of government: that is, in the rather unglamorous dealings of local administrators.23 In the fields of education, employment, welfare and healthcare provision, policing the working of post-racial logic is in operation: unspectacular, dogmatic and unrelenting.24 The practical manifestation of this phenomenon was repeatedly disclosed in the various country studies of the TOLERACE research project, in instance after instance in which racism was condemned but considered to be a thing of the past, insignificant or non-existent in the present. The criticism of post-racial America cannot be easily transplanted to the project of a post-racial Europe, since the routes by which the European Union came to embrace the post-racial are too different to allow for such effective transference. As we have shown, the idea of the post-racial has American beginnings but its itinerary has changed the way in which it interacts with other societies, in which it could be argued there has been a less effective, less pronounced anti-racist phase. In other words, to return the compliment that Oscar Wilde once made about the United States (that it had gone from barbarism to decadence without an intervening period of civilization), it 21 Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London and NY: Routledge 2005), 48–51. 22 Hollinger, ‘The concept of post-racial’, 176. 23 I was introduced to the phrase ‘the banality of government’ by Michael Keith, no doubt based on his experience as leader of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets: see Micheal Keith, After the Cosmopolitian? Multicultural Cities and the Future of Racism (London and New York: Routledge 2005). 40. 24 For a study of some of the ontic aspects of these developments, see detailed findings of research conducted under the auspices of the TOLERACE project in Sayyid, Law and Sian, Racism, Governance, and Public Policy. What was clear is how the background assumptions of ideas and themes associated with post-racial posturing have penetrated into capillary actions of organizations of various kinds (voluntary, state and so on).

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could be said that the European Union has gone from racism to post-racism without an intervening period of anti-racism. To make this observation more than a quip, in the next section of the paper, I suggest another reading of racism.

Politics, the political and the racial Ranged against these accounts of race, racism and anti-racism is a discourse in which racism appears as an aspect of coloniality and what can broadly be described as decolonial thought. Such an account can be associated with those who broadly work in the field of critical race theory. Rather than seeing racism as being either the work of Nazis, Social Darwinists or human DNA, the focus in this discourse is on structures of the world system. Accordingly, this discourse sees racism’s emergence as being historically and regionally specific and contemporaneous with early modern (European) empirestate formations. Racism is not something that is hard-wired into the human soul, or printed on the surface of human skins. Nor is it an exceptional part of the policies and pursuits of a specific ideological programme championed by thugs and cranks. Racism was and is intrinsic to the formation, consolidation and continuation of a world order that had its beginnings in the ‘long sixteenth century’. The enunciation of Europeanness has persistently been expressed through the conceptual formulation and circulation of the category of racism, and thus its contested nature reflects the conflict about the nature of European identity, and not simply the phenomena that it seeks to analyse. Racism as colonialism opens up the possibility not only of seeing it through the prism of racial states but also seeing these states as part of a racial international order. The nexus between colonialism and racism congeals in the form of the European imperial enterprise. The complex networks and projects that are glossed over under the discrete headings of the various European empires—Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, British, Russian—forged a racism that is a form of politics. By shifting the formation of races and racism from cultural-biological terrain to the political, what is being undertaken is not mere semantic re-description but rather a conceptual reconfiguration of ‘race’ and racism. Since the primary task of politics is the constitution of a people, racism is a form of constituting political subjects.25 The political constitution of peoples contrasts with claims for the social construction of racism.26 The post-racial 25 Ernesto Laclau, ‘Why constructing a people is the main task of radical politics’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 32, no. 4, 2006, 646–80. 26 For an elaboration of the difference between political constitution and social construction, see Barnor Hesse, ‘Preface: Counter-racial formation theory’, in P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon P. Woods (eds), Conceptual Aphasia in Black: Displacing Racial Formation (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books 2016), vii–xi.

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then has a ‘family resemblance’ with the post-political. To make good this claim, I want to explore the relationship between politics and the political. Politics is not to be understood as an activity confined to specific spheres (such as the legislature or government), but rather one that seeks to domesticate the political, and hence possible in any environment where the political is located. Carl Schmitt conceptualized the political as being determined by an antagonistic relationship between friends and enemies. The political thus arises whenever and wherever there is a friend/enemy distinction. Potentially all antagonistic relationships have the capacity to become existential conflicts. It is this capacity that marks out a friend/enemy distinction from the differences between opponents in a competition. A competition is controlled and structured: it does not pose an existential threat to its participants. Given the appearance of the political in the guise of the friend/enemy distinction, the second main feature of the political is the institution of rules. The political is corrosive of any form of social cohesion. The transformation of relations of difference and hierarchy into antagonisms threatens to turn society into a battleground where a ‘war of all against all’ is continuously waged.27 The attempt to limit this possibility can be described as politics.28 Politics is the ‘set of practices and institutions through which an order is created, organizing human coexistence in the context of conflictuality provided by the political’.29 The European expansion into the non-European world was unlike much (if not most other) imperial expansions, in that the barrier between Europeanness and non-Europeanness was maintained with a great deal of rigour and uncompromising strictness. The valorization of syncretic moments of this expansion point to how rare and marginal Creolization was to the overarching narrative of the European colonial enterprise.30 Rather, the syncretism did not extend to breaking the colour line. Latin America is often presented as a counter-example and, of course, in an enterprise lasting several centuries and spanning six continents, it would be foolish to maintain that there was no hybridization. The contrast between Europeanness and non-Europeanness, however, was hegemonically articulated and maintained. The construction of a racial hierarchy was not simply a response to the diversity of humankind, but a means of domesticating the antagonism at the heart of the distinction between Europeanness and non-Europeanness. Racism and its various cognates are a form of politics that organizes human coexistence in the context

27 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso 2013). 28 For more details of this account of the relationship between politics and the political, see Mouffe, On the Political; and Laclau, ‘Why constructing a people is the main task of radical politics’. 29 Mouffe, On the Political, 9. 30 S. Sayyid, ‘Empire, Islam and the postcolonial’, in Graham Huggan (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2013), 127–41.

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of the constitutive antagonistic relationships between Europeanness and nonEuropeanness. At the core of this formulation of racism as politics is the break with the idea that racism is best understood as a system of beliefs and values. It is also a break with the idea of ‘institutional racism’ as suggested by the Macpherson Report into the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence, killed while waiting for a bus by white assailants. The Macpherson enquiry was the culmination of a long and hard campaign waged by Doreen Lawrence and Neville Lawrence, the parents of Stephen, to scrutinize the failure of the police to investigate the crime adequately. Macpherson deploys the concept of institutional racism as a means of accounting for the failings of the police service. So, for the purposes of its report, Macpherson defined institutional racism along the following lines: The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.31

This definition of ‘institutional racism’ relocates racism as a problem centred on ethnically marked communities. Because it does not see racism as form of politics that seeks to domesticate the antagonism between Europeanness and non-Europeanness, it cannot deal with, for example, the explosion of Islamophobia. Since Islam is not a culture, Muslims are not a ‘race’ per se; and, as Muslims are not from one nation, they cannot be identified as being subjected to discrimination on racial grounds. In Islamophobia, it is possible to see the re-occupation of racist tropes by Muslim figures, but not Islamophobia as a form of racism. Reading racism as politics allows us to reconsider the value of the postracial. Throughout Europe, there is an agreement that Europeanness is incompatible with the tenants of racism. This agreement is part of the consensus that sees Europe as a horizon for a better future. The incompatibility of Europeanness and racism is only possible as long as a hermetic barrier is said to exist between racism and colonialism. If colonialism and racism can be seen as

31 The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry: Report of an Inquiry by Sir William Macpherson of Cluny, Cmd 4262-I (London: Stationery Office 1999), 6.34, available on the gov.uk website at www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/277111/4262. pdf (viewed 10 November 2016). It is worth contrasting this take on institutional racism with that first articulated by Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) and Charles Hamilton in Black Power (1967), in which institutional racism is part of the exercise of white power rather than the merely unintended consequences of the working of organizational machinery: see Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: the Politics of Liberation (New York: Vintage Books 1992).

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being equivalent, then a post-racial Europe is not possible without its decolonization. Deferring the decolonization of Europe is the central task of Eurocentrism. The attack on Marxists, Muslims and multiculturalism—which formed in the fevered imagination of Anders Breivik—is not simply the work of a delusional individual. If there is a delusion, than it goes beyond card-carrying Islamophobes who are increasingly vocal about the danger presented to Europe by Muslims. The criticism of post-political focuses on the inability of its theoreticians to understand that the friend/enemy distinction cannot simply be wished away, that such a distinction is ontological and constitutive of the political. What is necessary is an enlarged vocabulary for representing friends and enemies. The centrality of racism to the formation of a European world order meant that the enemy has too often been described through the logic of racism. The challenge of the post-racial would be the abandonment of racism as a form of politics. The current concern with issues of social cohesion, tolerance and western values, in its various national and regional inflexions and forms, does not abandon racism as politics but confirms it. The rise of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim movements and parties shows how postracial is not the elimination of racism but rather the continuation of racism as politics.

The post-racial and white entitlement A French philosopher’s comments on an American sitcom (that he does not seem to have watched) may be an odd place to begin a paper about the impact of post-racial developments in countries of the European Union. The juxtaposition, however, brings to the fore certain key developments of the culture of the Global North, a culture that is being transformed by the institutionalization of the war on terror as an international grammar. A part of this institutionalization is to rearticulate personal freedom as being intrinsic to the West and thus requiring the expulsion of colonialism and racism from the past. The European colonial enterprise made the world we, for the most part, live in. This exercise in world-making continues to be challenged but its defence, constructed by the neoconservative historic bloc, is based on a strategy of passive revolution that absorbs demands and in the process transforms them into constitutive elements of the discourse of white entitlement. The critique of racism has become globalized: it can be seen as being part of US soft power, something to be denounced, in international summits, in the reports of NGOs, in popular culture. Such denunciations sit alongside the expansion of the category of racism, thus watering down the specificity and critical capacity of the concept and undermining its potential to change practice. The post-racial condition is not, however, simply conceptual inflation. The significance of Seinfeld, as an illustration of the post-racial, arises from the way in which this American sitcom circulates globally, its ability to

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transcend national and linguistic boundaries. Seinfeld has an exemplary quality as a barometer of the development of a post-racial etiquette as part of its comedy of manners. Claims for racial harmony have become part of the national narrative of many western plutocracies. These claims, however, are undermined by the evidence of systematic violence and violations directed at ethically marked populations and the attempts to rehabilitate the claims associated with white privilege. The idea of a post-racial Europe remains parasitic on the development of the post-racial in American contexts. This postracial has contributed to the development of a new etiquette that governs the distinction between ethnically unmarked national majorities that represent qualities of Europeanness and ethnically marked postcolonial minorities that symbolize non-Europeanness. In this etiquette, a certain comportment towards racism is promoted that allows, for example, elite figures of ethnically marked populations to represent the modernity of the European Union. What it does not encourage or even permit is the radical rethinking of racism as something intrinsic to the formation of Europe and its continuing vision of itself. The post-racial arises not through the elimination of racism, but through a discursive re-configuration that makes it increasingly difficult to locate racism in western societies, except historically or exceptionally. The constitutive character of racism as a form of politics in the formation of the European state is elided. The post-racial dissolves the category of racist and, in so doing, seeks to disarm the idea of racism by expanding it beyond the weight it can conceptually and polemically bear. This awareness of racism and its expansion, I would suggest, signals the post-racial condition. The post-racial demonstrates an internalization of anti-racism but only at the expense of its dilution as a mechanism for establishing just treatment for the ethnically marked. Because the post-racial imagines that racism is over, it finds it difficult to see the racial logics in play in tropes such as ‘the failure of multiculturalism’, ‘social integration’, ‘identity politics’ and so on. A Europe that had abandoned racism would be a Europe that recognized the homology between racism and colonialism and was able to elaborate a vision of its self that was open to the possibility of a different kind of European identity. The post-racial has become complicit with an assertion of white entitlement most recently demonstrated in the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit referendum. An actual post-racial Europe would have to be not only anti-racist first but also decolonial. The end of racism in Europe requires not the ever more detailed elaboration of post-racial etiquette—with a list of what is or is not racist, who could or could not be racist—but rather an enunciation of the decolonization of Europe. Decolonization will remain incomplete until the metropole is also decolonized. The decolonization of the metropole opens a path for a world not without cruelty or injustice but a world without racism, and that is not a bad way to start. Seinfeld may not tell us much about deconstruction per se, but it reminds us that, without decolonization, deconstruction remains in many ways still to come.

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S. Sayyid is based at the University of Leeds, where he holds a Chair in Social Theory and Decolonial Thought. His recent major publications include A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism [1997], 3rd edn (Zed 2015), Thinking through Islamophobia: Global Perspectives (co-edited with AbdoolKarim Vakil, Hurst 2010), Racism, Governance and Public Policy (coauthored with Ian Law and Katy Sian) (Routledge 2013), and Recalling the Caliphate: Decolonization and the World Order (Hurst 2014). He is the founding editor of ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies. Email: S.Sayyid@ leeds.ac.uk