G
_ G O D _
Guest
Racist Britain: old cultural ideas,
new forms of slavery and genocide
http://www.workersliberty.org/node/8116
See all stories on this topic:
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ncl=http://www.workersliberty.org/node/8116
The recent anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade has prompted debate about
lessons for today. One lesson is that formal, legal reforms will never bring about
full equality under capitalism. Two hundred years on racism in Britain tragically
continues to thrive; it is continually being reshaped by capitalist imperatives and
bourgeois political concerns. It is a multi-faceted thing, taking economic,
political, social and cultural forms. It is experienced on a daily basis by black and
minority ethnic people in a variety of areas, including employment, public services,
the law and policing, media and politics and in the streets. Mike Rowley presents an
overview.
Racism in the labour market
Despite a multitude of initiatives and legal rulings - and the Race Relations Act is
now more than thirty years old - black workers still face significant discrimination
in the jobs market. The government's "Ethnic Minority Employment Task Force" found at
the end of 2006 that the employment rate for black and minority ethnic (BME) workers
is 59.7%, very much less than the figure of 74.7% for the whole population.
All non-white groups except Chinese people have employment rates lower than that for
white people. Black people between 16 and 24 have an employment rate of only 35%, and
are also disadvantaged in full-time education. Officially, just over 7% of black and
minority ethnic workers are reckoned to be unemployed, compared with just over 4% of
white workers. In fact the figures for both groups are almost certainly significantly
higher: the International Labour Organisation (ILO) gives the unemployment rate as
5.2% overall and 11.2% for BME workers. This suggests some racism in the unemployment
system (i.e. unemployed BME workers are encouraged to be "economically inactive" and
not claim benefit).
What is more, black and minority ethnic workers who do find a job are likely to be
paid less than white workers. The Ethnic Minority Employment Task Force found that
average pay for black and minority ethnic workers was ?29 a week less than for white
workers, and for Bangladeshi workers, the worst-off group in this and in many other
ways, it was ?141 a week less, or only five-eighths of the average pay of white
workers.
Black and ethnic minority workers, and particularly migrant workers, face limited job
opportunities in a restricted number of sectors. In the 1950s and 60s people from the
Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent were welcomed to Britain to fill a shortage of
unskilled and semi-skilled workers in manufacturing, transportation and the public
services, particularly the NHS.
Today this tendency to sectoral segregation continues, though with the decline of
manufacturing it has shifted somewhat. One in eight Pakistani men in work is a taxi
driver and 52% of male Bangladeshi workers work in the restaurant industry (Labour
Research Department, Black and Ethnic Minority Workers).
Anti-Muslim prejudice is rife among employers, and racism under a flimsy disguise is
often used to deny people jobs (applicants are told they do not "fit in" or "present
an appropriate image to the public"). Women are especially vulnerable. A Fawcett
Society report found that women of Muslim background are stereotyped as being
subservient, unwilling to work with men or concerned above all with having children.
Black Caribbean women are also stereotyped and "pigeonholed into jobs which are not
necessarily the ones they want to do".
At the bottom of the labour market are migrant workers. Many are forced, whatever
their qualifications, to work in unsafe and unpleasant conditions. In the East End of
London the GMB union has discovered sweatshop conditions and workers paid well below
the minimum wage. Some migrant workers are brought into the country by organised
criminals. Their documents are stolen and they are sometimes held against their will
by unscrupulous "gangmasters", who take their meagre wages as "repayment" for giving
the workers jobs.
All of this is possible because the workers can be threatened with reporting to the
police followed by imprisonment and deportation under Britain's draconian immigration
laws. Employers do not have to face the consequences of employing people illegally;
the Home Office sometimes puts pressure on them to sack migrant workers, if they wish
to force a particular national group out of the country (e.g. Iraqi Kurds), but does
not prosecute the employers. Employers are given an excuse to harass and even
arbitrarily sack "foreign-looking" workers because they think the workers may not be
allowed to work in Britain. Racism is thus built into the employment system.
The consequence of all this was seen in 2004 when 21 untrained Chinese workers
drowned in Morecambe Bay while working in grossly unsafe conditions.
Public services
Despite much equality legislation, black and minority ethnic people still face gross
inequalities in the allocation of public services, especially housing. A report from
the Commission for Racial Equality published at the beginning of February 2007 found
that in Wales, none of the twenty-two local authorities had carried out their legal
obligations relating to BME tenants.
Under the Race Relations (Amendment) Act, all councils have a legal responsibility to
carry out race equality impact assessments of their housing policies. According to
figures from the Welsh Assembly, people from ethnic minorities in Wales fare
significantly worse than whites in terms of their quality of housing. There is no
reason to believe the situation to be any different in the rest of Britain.
The overall lack of council housing is a situation exploited by racists. In places
where the BNP has been active, they have spread propaganda about more money being
spent on mainly black and/or Asian estates than on mainly white ones. Where there is
any truth in this (and there usually isn't) it happens because the estates with the
largest numbers of black and Asian people suffer more deprivation and the quality of
the housing is lower than elsewhere, some of it, indeed, unfit for human habitation.
Councils are merely doing their obvious duty in concentrating their meagre resources
on the poorest areas. However, they are unable to improve the only slightly better
housing on other estates at the same time because the "New Labour" government has
kept the Tory policy diverting much of the revenue of publicly-owned housing away
from the Council, and not allowing major expenditure to improve housing unless it is
privatised.
The government simply ignores the wishes of tenants and the overwhelming evidence
that this approach does not work. Communities are being condemned to poverty and
fragmentation, not by the impact of immigration or policies about multiculturalism
but by politicians' neurotic attachment to neo-liberal economic dogma.
If you are a Roma or other traveller you will face even worse discrimination in
housing provision. Travellers often face eviction from and bulldozing of their homes
by racist councils, even if they own the land on which caravans are parked and homes
are built. Councils, mostly Tory-controlled, simply refuse planning permission to any
application from a traveller, and sometimes attempt to demolish entire sites housing
dozens of families, such as Dale Farm in Basildon and Payne's Lane in Epping Forest.
In other cases, sites owned by Travellers are compulsorily purchased by councils,
supposedly for the Travellers' benefit; but the council then assumes the right to
evict residents at will, allowing them none of the rights other council tenants have.
Migrants are often in an even worse position. They find themselves shunted around
from local authority to local authority, with councils fuelling racism by complaining
about their areas being "dumping grounds" for migrants. A Community Care report found
that grossly substandard accommodation is provided by private companies under
contract to councils or to the Home Office. Worse, there are many cases of migrants
being made destitute under the government's ever more "tough" policies.
Forced destitution - denial even of the right to work, along with all benefits -
forces migrants into the "black economy", doing low-paid or even unpaid jobs which,
as the Morecambe Bay tragedy showed, can be lethal. Unsurprisingly people in this
situation suffer from hunger and both physical and mental health problems, and are
extremely vulnerable to sexual exploitation.
The consequences of this are exemplified by the fate of Israfil Shiri, from Iran, who
killed himself in Manchester in 2003 after being thrown out of his accommodation and
denied any benefits or any treatment for his painful illness. In Belfast, another
destitute migrant who was sleeping rough in winter had to have both feet amputated
because of frostbite.
The numbers of people in this terrible situation are frighteningly large: at the
beginning of 2005, 2,000 asylum seekers were homeless in Birmingham alone.
The law and policing
From the beginning of mass immigration to Britain, people originating outside the
country have been tarred with the brush of terrorism, disorder and a "threat" to "the
British way of life".
One of the main areas in which the law promotes racism is of course immigration.
Britain's first anti-immigrant law, the Aliens Act of 1905, was enacted by the then
Liberal government in response to anti-semitic agitation from a proto-fascist
organisation called the "British Brotherhood". Jewish refugees from the vicious
genocidal pogroms in Russia which formed part of the Tsarist reaction to the 1905
Revolution were denied entry to Britain.
Subsequent laws progressively restricted the rights of immigrants, and even people
with British passports who happened to be black, to move to Britain. With these
discriminatory laws there developed an immigration police with ever-increasing
powers, who increasingly harass not only migrants, but anyone they suspect might be a
migrant - that is, anyone with dark skin. It has not been uncommon for police to stop
all black people in an area and demand "proof" that they are legally entitled to live
in Britain.
Dawn raids are carried out on the homes of migrant families who have been split up
and rushed to "detention centres" (high-security prisons). John Reid began his period
as Home Secretary by accompanying police on one of these raids and gleefully
announcing its "success" to the press - the plunging of another family into misery.
Asylum seekers and other migrants can be arbitrarily detained, just as arbitrarily
released and detained again, as many times and for as long as the government likes.
Some have been in detention for years, having committed no crime and been suspected
of no crime. Many are forcibly deported to unsafe countries where it is known that,
tragically, some have been murdered and/or "disappeared".
Between 1989 and August 2006 according to the Institute of Race Relations, 222 asylum
seekers died either in Britain or trying to get here; 71 killed themselves in this
country; nineteen were murdered by racists - nine of these in the last five years.
The Stephen Lawrence enquiry revealed the "institutional racism" of the police.
Despite the subsequent setting of many targets and so on, it is well-known that
police operations in general still tend to target people who "look foreign". In
2001/02, 12% of stops and searches recorded by the police were of black people (who
constitute 1.8% of the population) and 6% of Asian people (2.7% of the population).
Black people were eight times more likely to be stopped and searched than white
people, and four times more likely to be arrested. In the same year, following the
events of September 11th 2001, stops and searches of Asians increased in London by
40% and in the rest of the country by 16%. The events also seem to have been used as
an excuse for increased targeting of people of African and Afro-Caribbean origin - up
30% in London and 6% in the rest of the country.
Black suspects are less likely to be let off with a caution than white people, and
less likely to be offered bail. They are six times more likely to be sent to prison
than white people and more likely to be imprisoned for a first offence, although the
acquittal rate for black defendants is significantly higher than that for white
defendants, simply because so many cases are brought against them based on little or
no evidence.
In 2002, almost a quarter of prisoners come from an ethnic minority background and
15% of all prisoners were black.
Politicians frequently make statements which can only tacitly encourage racism in the
legal system: witness the call the leaderships of all the three main political
parties in 2006 for "foreign criminals" to be punished twice by being deported or
subjected to special movement restrictions - that is, they should be punished twice
just because they were not born in Britain. Even people of dual nationality who are
British citizens have been deported.
Racism is also reflected in the structure of the legal profession. The higher you go,
the less black and minority ethnic people there are. In 2001 9% of barristers were
from an ethnic minority background, 4.8% of magistrates, just over 1% of QCs (senior
barristers) and less than 1% of circuit judges.
According to the Institute of Race Relations 170 black and minority ethnic people
died in custody in suspicious circumstances between 1978 and 2003; there has been no
appreciable diminution in such incidents over all those years.
Politics and the media
In a capitalist society, the ruling class habitually uses racism in order to divide
the working class. Sometimes it really is as straightforward as that sounds. While
the actions of individuals may be more complex in their motivation, the bourgeois
political system can be pretty crude - their intention to whip up and exploit racism
obvious.
From the racist panic leading to the Aliens Act of 1905, referred to above (which
took place during a period of renascent union militancy) through Enoch Powell's
infamous "rivers of blood" speech and Norman Tebbit's "cricket test" of "loyalty" to
Britain, to today's more circumspect, but just as corrosive, discourse about Asians
not wanting to participate in "mainstream" British society and being drawn into
terrorism - there is a long and vicious line of deliberately divisive nonsense.
At present media emphasis is on anti-Muslim racism. Repeated media scares about
terrorism have combined with constant new "security crackdowns" announced by
politicians to produce something approaching hysteria about the possibility that
"foreign-looking" people are murderous fanatics.
In 2005 Hazel Blears, then a Home Office minister, excused police targeting of Asians
by saying "Some of our counter-terrorism powers will be disproportionately
experienced by the Muslim community. If a threat is from a particular place, then our
action is going to be targeted at that area".
So people are encouraged to believe, on government authority, that the threat of
terrorism comes not from ultra-Islamist (actually right wing) politics but from "the
Muslim community" in general.
In such an atmosphere, it is not surprising that when BNP canvassers in Dagenham told
people that all asylum-seekers got ?5,000 to buy a car and that many asylum seekers
were "Muslim terrorists", a substantial number of people believed these lies.
According to Understanding Prejudice, a major survey published in 2004 by the gay
rights group Stonewall, two-thirds of white people surveyed admitted to some
prejudice, even if only casual or unintentional, against one or several minority
groups. Even three years after September 11th, the most widespread prejudice was
against Roma and other Travellers, followed by prejudice against asylum seekers.
Anti-Muslim racism has increased still further since that time.
According to the Institute of Race Relations, between January 2001 and August 2006
there were forty-seven murders with a known or suspected racial element. In 2000-01
police recorded 25,100 racist crimes and this is probably just the tip of the
iceberg. It is also clear that not nearly enough is being done to stop this tide of
racist violence.
Mal Hussain, the Asian shopkeeper who suffered fourteen years of racist abuse and
violent attacks in Lancaster, said that "I feel betrayed and failed by the
institutions who are supposed to protect those who suffer in the hands of racists".
Mal Hussain was abused and attacked for being "Asian", for being "Muslim", for being
"black", and for having a white partner.
It is apparent that anti-Muslim racism is an important sense just the new "cutting
edge" of a much older and more comprehensive problem. It is used by racists as both a
chisel to open up more general forms of racism, and a convenient cover for them.
Immediately after the 7th July terrorist atrocity in London, there were racist
attacks on three mosques - and a Sikh gurdwara. As Dave Renton observes, "The new
racism is both old and new. It may take different forms, but it also reinvigorates
older ones"
--
_____________________________________________________
I intend to last long enough to put out of business all ****-suckers
and other beneficiaries of the institutionalized slavery and genocide.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The army that will defeat terrorism doesn't wear uniforms, or drive
Humvees, or calls in air-strikes. It doesn't have a high command, or
high security, or a high budget. The army that can defeat terrorism
does battle quietly, clearing minefields and vaccinating children. It
undermines military dictatorships and military lobbyists. It subverts
sweatshops and special interests.Where people feel powerless, it
helps them organize for change, and where people are powerful, it
reminds them of their responsibility." ~~~~ Author Unknown ~~~~
___________________________________________________
--
new forms of slavery and genocide
http://www.workersliberty.org/node/8116
See all stories on this topic:
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ncl=http://www.workersliberty.org/node/8116
The recent anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade has prompted debate about
lessons for today. One lesson is that formal, legal reforms will never bring about
full equality under capitalism. Two hundred years on racism in Britain tragically
continues to thrive; it is continually being reshaped by capitalist imperatives and
bourgeois political concerns. It is a multi-faceted thing, taking economic,
political, social and cultural forms. It is experienced on a daily basis by black and
minority ethnic people in a variety of areas, including employment, public services,
the law and policing, media and politics and in the streets. Mike Rowley presents an
overview.
Racism in the labour market
Despite a multitude of initiatives and legal rulings - and the Race Relations Act is
now more than thirty years old - black workers still face significant discrimination
in the jobs market. The government's "Ethnic Minority Employment Task Force" found at
the end of 2006 that the employment rate for black and minority ethnic (BME) workers
is 59.7%, very much less than the figure of 74.7% for the whole population.
All non-white groups except Chinese people have employment rates lower than that for
white people. Black people between 16 and 24 have an employment rate of only 35%, and
are also disadvantaged in full-time education. Officially, just over 7% of black and
minority ethnic workers are reckoned to be unemployed, compared with just over 4% of
white workers. In fact the figures for both groups are almost certainly significantly
higher: the International Labour Organisation (ILO) gives the unemployment rate as
5.2% overall and 11.2% for BME workers. This suggests some racism in the unemployment
system (i.e. unemployed BME workers are encouraged to be "economically inactive" and
not claim benefit).
What is more, black and minority ethnic workers who do find a job are likely to be
paid less than white workers. The Ethnic Minority Employment Task Force found that
average pay for black and minority ethnic workers was ?29 a week less than for white
workers, and for Bangladeshi workers, the worst-off group in this and in many other
ways, it was ?141 a week less, or only five-eighths of the average pay of white
workers.
Black and ethnic minority workers, and particularly migrant workers, face limited job
opportunities in a restricted number of sectors. In the 1950s and 60s people from the
Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent were welcomed to Britain to fill a shortage of
unskilled and semi-skilled workers in manufacturing, transportation and the public
services, particularly the NHS.
Today this tendency to sectoral segregation continues, though with the decline of
manufacturing it has shifted somewhat. One in eight Pakistani men in work is a taxi
driver and 52% of male Bangladeshi workers work in the restaurant industry (Labour
Research Department, Black and Ethnic Minority Workers).
Anti-Muslim prejudice is rife among employers, and racism under a flimsy disguise is
often used to deny people jobs (applicants are told they do not "fit in" or "present
an appropriate image to the public"). Women are especially vulnerable. A Fawcett
Society report found that women of Muslim background are stereotyped as being
subservient, unwilling to work with men or concerned above all with having children.
Black Caribbean women are also stereotyped and "pigeonholed into jobs which are not
necessarily the ones they want to do".
At the bottom of the labour market are migrant workers. Many are forced, whatever
their qualifications, to work in unsafe and unpleasant conditions. In the East End of
London the GMB union has discovered sweatshop conditions and workers paid well below
the minimum wage. Some migrant workers are brought into the country by organised
criminals. Their documents are stolen and they are sometimes held against their will
by unscrupulous "gangmasters", who take their meagre wages as "repayment" for giving
the workers jobs.
All of this is possible because the workers can be threatened with reporting to the
police followed by imprisonment and deportation under Britain's draconian immigration
laws. Employers do not have to face the consequences of employing people illegally;
the Home Office sometimes puts pressure on them to sack migrant workers, if they wish
to force a particular national group out of the country (e.g. Iraqi Kurds), but does
not prosecute the employers. Employers are given an excuse to harass and even
arbitrarily sack "foreign-looking" workers because they think the workers may not be
allowed to work in Britain. Racism is thus built into the employment system.
The consequence of all this was seen in 2004 when 21 untrained Chinese workers
drowned in Morecambe Bay while working in grossly unsafe conditions.
Public services
Despite much equality legislation, black and minority ethnic people still face gross
inequalities in the allocation of public services, especially housing. A report from
the Commission for Racial Equality published at the beginning of February 2007 found
that in Wales, none of the twenty-two local authorities had carried out their legal
obligations relating to BME tenants.
Under the Race Relations (Amendment) Act, all councils have a legal responsibility to
carry out race equality impact assessments of their housing policies. According to
figures from the Welsh Assembly, people from ethnic minorities in Wales fare
significantly worse than whites in terms of their quality of housing. There is no
reason to believe the situation to be any different in the rest of Britain.
The overall lack of council housing is a situation exploited by racists. In places
where the BNP has been active, they have spread propaganda about more money being
spent on mainly black and/or Asian estates than on mainly white ones. Where there is
any truth in this (and there usually isn't) it happens because the estates with the
largest numbers of black and Asian people suffer more deprivation and the quality of
the housing is lower than elsewhere, some of it, indeed, unfit for human habitation.
Councils are merely doing their obvious duty in concentrating their meagre resources
on the poorest areas. However, they are unable to improve the only slightly better
housing on other estates at the same time because the "New Labour" government has
kept the Tory policy diverting much of the revenue of publicly-owned housing away
from the Council, and not allowing major expenditure to improve housing unless it is
privatised.
The government simply ignores the wishes of tenants and the overwhelming evidence
that this approach does not work. Communities are being condemned to poverty and
fragmentation, not by the impact of immigration or policies about multiculturalism
but by politicians' neurotic attachment to neo-liberal economic dogma.
If you are a Roma or other traveller you will face even worse discrimination in
housing provision. Travellers often face eviction from and bulldozing of their homes
by racist councils, even if they own the land on which caravans are parked and homes
are built. Councils, mostly Tory-controlled, simply refuse planning permission to any
application from a traveller, and sometimes attempt to demolish entire sites housing
dozens of families, such as Dale Farm in Basildon and Payne's Lane in Epping Forest.
In other cases, sites owned by Travellers are compulsorily purchased by councils,
supposedly for the Travellers' benefit; but the council then assumes the right to
evict residents at will, allowing them none of the rights other council tenants have.
Migrants are often in an even worse position. They find themselves shunted around
from local authority to local authority, with councils fuelling racism by complaining
about their areas being "dumping grounds" for migrants. A Community Care report found
that grossly substandard accommodation is provided by private companies under
contract to councils or to the Home Office. Worse, there are many cases of migrants
being made destitute under the government's ever more "tough" policies.
Forced destitution - denial even of the right to work, along with all benefits -
forces migrants into the "black economy", doing low-paid or even unpaid jobs which,
as the Morecambe Bay tragedy showed, can be lethal. Unsurprisingly people in this
situation suffer from hunger and both physical and mental health problems, and are
extremely vulnerable to sexual exploitation.
The consequences of this are exemplified by the fate of Israfil Shiri, from Iran, who
killed himself in Manchester in 2003 after being thrown out of his accommodation and
denied any benefits or any treatment for his painful illness. In Belfast, another
destitute migrant who was sleeping rough in winter had to have both feet amputated
because of frostbite.
The numbers of people in this terrible situation are frighteningly large: at the
beginning of 2005, 2,000 asylum seekers were homeless in Birmingham alone.
The law and policing
From the beginning of mass immigration to Britain, people originating outside the
country have been tarred with the brush of terrorism, disorder and a "threat" to "the
British way of life".
One of the main areas in which the law promotes racism is of course immigration.
Britain's first anti-immigrant law, the Aliens Act of 1905, was enacted by the then
Liberal government in response to anti-semitic agitation from a proto-fascist
organisation called the "British Brotherhood". Jewish refugees from the vicious
genocidal pogroms in Russia which formed part of the Tsarist reaction to the 1905
Revolution were denied entry to Britain.
Subsequent laws progressively restricted the rights of immigrants, and even people
with British passports who happened to be black, to move to Britain. With these
discriminatory laws there developed an immigration police with ever-increasing
powers, who increasingly harass not only migrants, but anyone they suspect might be a
migrant - that is, anyone with dark skin. It has not been uncommon for police to stop
all black people in an area and demand "proof" that they are legally entitled to live
in Britain.
Dawn raids are carried out on the homes of migrant families who have been split up
and rushed to "detention centres" (high-security prisons). John Reid began his period
as Home Secretary by accompanying police on one of these raids and gleefully
announcing its "success" to the press - the plunging of another family into misery.
Asylum seekers and other migrants can be arbitrarily detained, just as arbitrarily
released and detained again, as many times and for as long as the government likes.
Some have been in detention for years, having committed no crime and been suspected
of no crime. Many are forcibly deported to unsafe countries where it is known that,
tragically, some have been murdered and/or "disappeared".
Between 1989 and August 2006 according to the Institute of Race Relations, 222 asylum
seekers died either in Britain or trying to get here; 71 killed themselves in this
country; nineteen were murdered by racists - nine of these in the last five years.
The Stephen Lawrence enquiry revealed the "institutional racism" of the police.
Despite the subsequent setting of many targets and so on, it is well-known that
police operations in general still tend to target people who "look foreign". In
2001/02, 12% of stops and searches recorded by the police were of black people (who
constitute 1.8% of the population) and 6% of Asian people (2.7% of the population).
Black people were eight times more likely to be stopped and searched than white
people, and four times more likely to be arrested. In the same year, following the
events of September 11th 2001, stops and searches of Asians increased in London by
40% and in the rest of the country by 16%. The events also seem to have been used as
an excuse for increased targeting of people of African and Afro-Caribbean origin - up
30% in London and 6% in the rest of the country.
Black suspects are less likely to be let off with a caution than white people, and
less likely to be offered bail. They are six times more likely to be sent to prison
than white people and more likely to be imprisoned for a first offence, although the
acquittal rate for black defendants is significantly higher than that for white
defendants, simply because so many cases are brought against them based on little or
no evidence.
In 2002, almost a quarter of prisoners come from an ethnic minority background and
15% of all prisoners were black.
Politicians frequently make statements which can only tacitly encourage racism in the
legal system: witness the call the leaderships of all the three main political
parties in 2006 for "foreign criminals" to be punished twice by being deported or
subjected to special movement restrictions - that is, they should be punished twice
just because they were not born in Britain. Even people of dual nationality who are
British citizens have been deported.
Racism is also reflected in the structure of the legal profession. The higher you go,
the less black and minority ethnic people there are. In 2001 9% of barristers were
from an ethnic minority background, 4.8% of magistrates, just over 1% of QCs (senior
barristers) and less than 1% of circuit judges.
According to the Institute of Race Relations 170 black and minority ethnic people
died in custody in suspicious circumstances between 1978 and 2003; there has been no
appreciable diminution in such incidents over all those years.
Politics and the media
In a capitalist society, the ruling class habitually uses racism in order to divide
the working class. Sometimes it really is as straightforward as that sounds. While
the actions of individuals may be more complex in their motivation, the bourgeois
political system can be pretty crude - their intention to whip up and exploit racism
obvious.
From the racist panic leading to the Aliens Act of 1905, referred to above (which
took place during a period of renascent union militancy) through Enoch Powell's
infamous "rivers of blood" speech and Norman Tebbit's "cricket test" of "loyalty" to
Britain, to today's more circumspect, but just as corrosive, discourse about Asians
not wanting to participate in "mainstream" British society and being drawn into
terrorism - there is a long and vicious line of deliberately divisive nonsense.
At present media emphasis is on anti-Muslim racism. Repeated media scares about
terrorism have combined with constant new "security crackdowns" announced by
politicians to produce something approaching hysteria about the possibility that
"foreign-looking" people are murderous fanatics.
In 2005 Hazel Blears, then a Home Office minister, excused police targeting of Asians
by saying "Some of our counter-terrorism powers will be disproportionately
experienced by the Muslim community. If a threat is from a particular place, then our
action is going to be targeted at that area".
So people are encouraged to believe, on government authority, that the threat of
terrorism comes not from ultra-Islamist (actually right wing) politics but from "the
Muslim community" in general.
In such an atmosphere, it is not surprising that when BNP canvassers in Dagenham told
people that all asylum-seekers got ?5,000 to buy a car and that many asylum seekers
were "Muslim terrorists", a substantial number of people believed these lies.
According to Understanding Prejudice, a major survey published in 2004 by the gay
rights group Stonewall, two-thirds of white people surveyed admitted to some
prejudice, even if only casual or unintentional, against one or several minority
groups. Even three years after September 11th, the most widespread prejudice was
against Roma and other Travellers, followed by prejudice against asylum seekers.
Anti-Muslim racism has increased still further since that time.
According to the Institute of Race Relations, between January 2001 and August 2006
there were forty-seven murders with a known or suspected racial element. In 2000-01
police recorded 25,100 racist crimes and this is probably just the tip of the
iceberg. It is also clear that not nearly enough is being done to stop this tide of
racist violence.
Mal Hussain, the Asian shopkeeper who suffered fourteen years of racist abuse and
violent attacks in Lancaster, said that "I feel betrayed and failed by the
institutions who are supposed to protect those who suffer in the hands of racists".
Mal Hussain was abused and attacked for being "Asian", for being "Muslim", for being
"black", and for having a white partner.
It is apparent that anti-Muslim racism is an important sense just the new "cutting
edge" of a much older and more comprehensive problem. It is used by racists as both a
chisel to open up more general forms of racism, and a convenient cover for them.
Immediately after the 7th July terrorist atrocity in London, there were racist
attacks on three mosques - and a Sikh gurdwara. As Dave Renton observes, "The new
racism is both old and new. It may take different forms, but it also reinvigorates
older ones"
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I intend to last long enough to put out of business all ****-suckers
and other beneficiaries of the institutionalized slavery and genocide.
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"The army that will defeat terrorism doesn't wear uniforms, or drive
Humvees, or calls in air-strikes. It doesn't have a high command, or
high security, or a high budget. The army that can defeat terrorism
does battle quietly, clearing minefields and vaccinating children. It
undermines military dictatorships and military lobbyists. It subverts
sweatshops and special interests.Where people feel powerless, it
helps them organize for change, and where people are powerful, it
reminds them of their responsibility." ~~~~ Author Unknown ~~~~
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