The Nation of Islam was founded in Detroit in 1930, officially by Wallace D. Fard, although controversies still persist as to his real identity, Wallace Dodd Ford being one alias and stories about his conman origins abounding; and the Moorish Science Temple of America was an intermediate development. NOI was subsequently led by Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan (all of whom changed their names). An unlikely backstory of NOI includes blacks coming from the original Shabazz tribe, a mad scientist character called Yacub who divided the races and created white devils, and a UFO; and its identity is one of black supremacy and separatism. Muammar Gaddafi donated large sums to the NOI organisation; and Farrakhan has spoken warmly of scientology. NOI is accused of anti-Semitism and homophobia, and Farrakhan is banned from speaking in Britain (despite attempts by Sadiq Khan when a lawyer to overturn this ban in 2001), although NOI has a presence here.
Now, all religions make many unprovable claims and have bizarre narratives attached to them, and Dutton (2014) outlines the ways in which religious belief correlates with low intelligence. But some of the black religions have special characteristics. Quite apart from traditional loud and emotional evangelical black churches, consider Rastafarianism, founded in the 1930s in Jamaica with Abrahamic foundations, an Afrocentric and anti-colonialist focus, Haile Selassie as a saviour, and cannabis smoking as a sacrament. Bob Marley, the Jamaican reggae musician and father of ten in his short life of 36 years, is probably the best-known Rastafari. Consider too the John Coltrane Church, founded in San Francisco in 1965 with the famous jazz musician as its inspiration and multiple sources of identity sustaining its drive for black liberation. Given their understandable, African-rooted political and religious fusion character, how well are such movements likely to fit the secular humanist British context, and how likely are their followers to assimilate? How far are Europeans prepared to see their hard-won and longstanding Enlightenment traditions eroded by beliefs in unverifiable spiritual entities, UFOs, cannabis consumption, borderline psychiatric phenomena, and political Africanism?
Black liberation theology has not touched the UK as it has the USA, where from the 1970s black academics like James Cone (2010) have pushed an interpretation of the Christian God as being on the side of oppressed blacks, who must embrace a political theology. African Americans resemble the Biblical Israelites, and they need to recognise black power and oppose capitalism. Cone was influenced by Martin Luther King Jnr and Malcolm X. King remains the hero of the civil rights movement but his use of the emotional black sermonic tradition, the metaphor of the promised land, and the call not only for equality but for reparations are still influential. In the 1970 edition of Cone’s book, Rev. Jeremiah Wright (Obama’s former pastor) had called for whites ‘to hate their whiteness’. Indeed, Braun (1990) believes that deliberately stimulated black anger seeks to manipulate longstanding white guilt, not for justice but for revenge and revolution.
Let me bring this section towards an end with two American examples. First, the boxing match between Floyd ‘Money’ Mayweather Jnr and Conor McGregor in Las Vegas in August 2017. Some called this a money-making circus, given the huge discrepancy between the fighters’ experience. Mayweather, from a family of boxers, a school drop-out, is now a retired world champion black boxer with a history of domestic violence. McGregor is a white Irishman from a humble background, who fought as a boxer and in mixed martial arts from his youth, and is known for his ‘trash talk’. It was reported that Mayweather could net around $100 million and McGregor $75 million from their fight. Blacks have dominated the sport of boxing. The Irish, sometimes referred to as ‘the niggers of Europe’, have a fearsome reputation for violence and a history of colonisation, slavery, famine and emigration. The Mayweather-McGregor contest was watched by up to a billion people worldwide and we must wonder why the primitive and dangerous sport of boxing still excites such gladiatorial passion. Sometimes referred to as part of sporting negritude, it is a common route for black men to escape poverty and draws on their physical prowess. Are they playing to their strengths or simply taking such avenues because ‘less primitive’ or more cerebral paths to success are denied them?
The second example is the 2017 debut of Kathryn Bigelow’s film Detroit. This focuses on the massive (10,000 rioters, 43 dead, five days duration) riot in Detroit in 1967 which included much arson and looting, and it concentrates in particular on the indefensible police killing of two black men. The film vividly depicts the gut-felt race hatred of some of the police officers and the attitudinal racism of the prosecution and all-white jury, who acquitted the defendants. Against the theme of racism and poverty sits a Motown story, and the film ends with a group of black characters getting a recording contract, while one of them cannot stomach the prospect of singing for whites so instead joins a gospel choir. His pure, soulful singing seems to express and rise above all the tribulations. But it may also suggest that the authoritarian, capitalist white man lost his spiritual, emotional and sensory purity and power, and decency, a long time ago. In contrast to this view, Sowell (2011b) argues that Detroit was ‘ruined by years of liberal social policies’. It has even been called ‘America’s third-world city’. Those blacks who can, continue to escape from poverty via basketball, athletics and boxing, and music of certain genres, which unfortunately reinforce the stereotype of high physicality, expressiveness and sensuality versus high IQ and delayed gratification.
Had transatlantic slavery not happened, and British colonies had not been established in Africa and the Caribbean, things would be very different today. In effect, millions of Africans were imported into the USA, enslaved and often treated extremely cruelly, and even after emancipation were not given equal civil rights for many years. And today interracial tensions often run high and full integration may never occur. This resulted from the selfish, artificial, forceful and short-sighted importation of one people into an entirely alien context, and so was a self-inflicted injury. Although direct importation of slaves into Britain was on a far smaller scale, the reach of Empire and subsequent developments also constituted a self-inflicted injury with the ongoing negative results we are experiencing today. Some of our ancestors made some bad choices that do not, however, implicate the rest of us in guilt forevermore, if at all. But those choices leave us with considerable civil unrest that we have to address somehow, and we do not yet know how to go about this.
Barack Obama’s presidency was a cathartic moment for Americans. The UK is not yet close to such a moment. However, the marriage of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in 2018 appears to have unleashed among some the exciting prospect of a similar symbolism. The professional provocatrice Afua Hirsch (2018a) refers to the British Royal Family as the ‘very antithesis of diversity’, while Markle represents ‘the heritage that has always been most othered in Britain — black and African’. Markle’s mother is a black American and her father white, and she herself is a divorced black actress who is, however, quite fair-skinned. What this story means to some observers is that even British royalty, its very bloodline, will bend to the irresistible rise of diversity, with the wished-for possibility that any children they have may be triumphantly dark-skinned. This is not exactly race replacement but it surely symbolises it. Some are making links with Princess Diana’s last relationship with Dodi Fayed, a Muslim, who died with her. And the 2017 film Victoria & Abdul paints a tauntingly pseudo-romantic relationship between the Queen of the British Empire and a Muslim servant.
5
Understanding Racism
As a starting point in understanding so-called xenophobia, take the notion of a large group of people who are different from the indigenous majority, who legitimately come to and remain for a time in our country, and who rightfully or not trigger suspicion and unease. When over a million American GIs came to Britain from 1942 to 1945 there was much fascination shown by young British women and conversely quite some resentment by British men who found these Yanks ‘oversexed, overpaid and over here’. Remarks were made abo
ut how confident, good-looking, healthy, well-dressed and well-off they were (earning about three times the wage of their British counterparts), and many war time romances occurred. Some 13%of the GIs were black, and attractive to some British women, which caused some tensions and resulted in many post-war ‘brown babies’. Black Americans were often treated better in the UK than at home, where segregation was still enforced. But for the most part tensions were not due to different skin colour but to a sense of territorial occupation, deep cultural differences, sexual competition and insecurity. But the Americans were not poor or for the most part a different colour, nor were they here to stay (Reynolds, 1995). We do not call this ephemeral anti-Americanism racism.
Xenophiles insist the concept of race has no validity. UNESCO issued post-Holocaust official statements from 1950 onwards to clarify the concept of human equality. Pioneered by Ashley Montagu among others, UNESCO policy statements denied the reality of race (see Montagu, 1997), although some academics still display racial anxiety and semantic qualms in grappling with the problems of abolishing race as a category (Hazard, 2011). Yet xenophiles freely denounce their enemies — their other — as racist, presumably based on the fantasy of race and racial characteristics, and the terms racist and racism are applied equally to anyone suspected of any order of magnitude of racism. Dictionary definitions of racism are not especially helpful, as they simply point to prejudice, discrimination and antagonism, and to beliefs about the inferiority or superiority of certain races. Psychologists cannot necessarily identify any specific aetiology of xenophobia or racism or offer any cures, in spite of showing great sensitivity to victims (Staub, 2003; Yakushko, 2009). I refer here mainly to white-on-black racism. I list these to argue that they are not at all of the same order of magnitude, and also to try to examine them a little more closely than is customary. Since this kind of discussion is typically conducted in primarily emotional terms, I focus closely on certain examples. Since much discussion of such topics is typically euphemistic, I try here to be explicit and honest.
The most extreme form of racism is surely organised serial killing, mass murder or genocide. Examples abound throughout history and in many places, the most horrific, recent and vivid being the Nazi Holocaust of Jews and others in the 1930/40s. The Ku Klux Klan had its original incarnation in the 19th century but is probably best known for its lynchings of thousands of black Americans which ended only in the 1960s. Many genocides are recorded across history and into the present day, most of which are grounded in territorialism, ethnic conflict and beliefs in ethnic supremacy. The 1994 genocide in Rwanda of up to one million Tutsis by Hutus was an inter-tribal massacre. In spite of slave traders’ dehumanising, violent and racist treatment of Africans, exterminatory genocide was not their purpose. Genocides by Stalin (up to 20 million) and Mao Zedong (approximately 40 million deaths) provide ‘non-racist’ examples of victims who were simply in the way of communist progress.
One-off incidents of violent racism include the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1991 by a gang of young white men in what seems to have been a spontaneous, primitive and cowardly attack based in irrational, visceral hatred in an area of London that had known ethnic tensions. Similar violent pack behaviour has been witnessed among chimpanzees (Wrangham & Peterson, 1997). Little careful analysis exists of the precise causes of an attack like the Lawrence case, mostly being subsumed under the unhelpfully vague heading of race hatred. This level of racism is characterised by visceral contempt, disgust and dehumanisation (Smith, 2011).
Police brutality resulting in the deaths of black citizens is a more contentious topic but the death in 1993 of a Jamaican woman, Joy Gardner, stands out. She had arrived in Britain pregnant and on a six-months student visa which she overstayed. Deportation proceedings followed, during which she forcefully resisted, she was gagged and bound, and subsequently died of cerebral hypoxia. The police officers charged with manslaughter were acquitted, fuelling further mistrust.
Apart from physically violent racism we have examples of so-called race hatred often thought to equate with violence. When football fans hiss collectively at Tottenham Hotspur games this is a coded reference to the gassing of Jews in the Holocaust and is a self-evidently stupid and ugly phenomenon. The conviction of four Chelsea supporters for aggravated racist violence in Paris in 2015 entailed them pushing a black Frenchman to prevent him boarding the crowded metro train. Some fans could be heard chanting ‘We’re racist, and that’s the way we like it’ but it is not clear if those convicted were themselves chanting. The victim said he was afraid for his life and suffered psychologically for months afterwards. The incident was certainly unpleasant and indefensible, and involved pushing, but not everyone would describe it as violent. The Guardian published a video of the event and appeared to celebrate it as a ‘defining moment in anti-racism cases’.
Racial harassment or hate crimes are recorded as increasing in Britain. Nandi and Luthra (2017) report that up to 15% of Chinese people, Pakistani men, Indian Sikh men, Indian Muslim women and Bangladeshi women are racially harassed on the streets, in shops or on public transport. Harassment includes reported incidents of being ‘insulted, called names, threatened or shouted at or physically attacked in a public place’. Fear of anticipated harassment is double the actual incidence. These incidents are found more often in areas of lower multicultural density, where those affected stand out more. We are not told who the harassers are (they may include some non-whites) but they are probably mainly lower-class males. Ugly behaviour of this kind is hard to monitor or change but draconian application of hate crime laws may affect future figures. We can assume, however, that 85% of immigrants or non-whites are never or rarely harassed.
Incitement to violence and murder by verbal statements may be a growing trend. When the British aristocrat Rhodri Philipps was convicted for inciting violence against Gina Miller in 2017, this was clearly such a case (although probably more foolish bravado than actual evil intent). It was said that Enoch Powell’s speeches on immigration and repatriation encouraged ‘Paki-bashing’ but there is no evidence that Powell himself (whose polyglot accomplishments included Arabic and Urdu) hated blacks, or wished for violence against them. Fatwas pronounced by those like Ayatollah Khomeini and various hate preachers are clearly direct incitements to murder ‘infidels’. The status of violent rap lyrics along ‘kill whitey’ lines is unclear but highly suggestive, and certainly more than a match for many racist hate crimes (American Renaissance, undated).
Then we have racist insults. Associated with some football fans’ behaviour is throwing banana skins on to the pitch, which signifies an insulting but enduring belief that black players look like monkeys or apes (Goff et al., 2008; Hund & Mills, 2016). Reactions to this can vary from finding it disgusting, criminal racism through to silly, immature behaviour. However, it is acutely personal when Michelle Obama was described by some as ‘an ape in heels’. This is a particular form of racism, based on the belief or propaganda that people of African descent resemble apes because they are less physically evolved than whites, and closer in evolutionary terms to apes. It is linked to the idea of Africans as savages who have not attained and possibly cannot attain the level of civilisation attained by whites, and also linked with contested cold winters theory whereby Europeans were forced to adapt rapidly to harsh climatic conditions and in the process became both lighter skinned and more intelligent (Pesta & Poznanski, 2014). Now, it is difficult to tease apart two elements here: (a) the extent to which some white racists do not actually believe this but use it in order to denigrate blacks; (b) the extent to which some whites sincerely believe this to be true. For some anti-racists, it is all a oneness of baseless, vile, inexplicable racism, but it may be conceded that there are some differences here.
So-called racist science or scientific racism is dismissed by anti-racists, who often indignantly refuse any conversation about this topic, and the standard refutation is simply that unjustified hatred underpins such ugly misperceptions a
nd stupid assertions. The belief that whites are in any way intrinsically superior to blacks is dismissed as unsupportable white supremacy. But links between the evolution of pale skin, blue eyes, straight and fair hair, other anatomical features (including average smaller genitalia), larger brain size, different rates of infant and sexual development, and the greater cognitive, industrial, and technological achievements of Western (Caucasian) civilisation remain largely unexplained, and investigation of such phenomena by authors like Rushton (1997) and Lynn (2015) is suppressed or mocked.
It is worth considering briefly the reverse of insults against blacks. Barack Obama in 2009 famously said that ‘you can put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig’. Ostensibly this was about his Republican rivals’ policies but many believe he was insulting Sarah Palin, the Alaskan senator, ex-beauty queen and mother of five children. Perceptions of other races or ethnicities as inferior, stupid and ugly are held by most people, including many blacks who deride white dancing, imply that black sexuality is superior to white, say that whites smell of damp dogs; and African supremacists regard whites as barbarians.
Excessive Immigration Page 7
