by Akala
The idea that ‘economic anxiety’ was the key driver of Trump’s election simply melts into thin air when we recognise that the poorest Americans – black and indigenous – did not support Trump in any great capacity. In fact, the average Trump voter earned twice the median salary of the average black American, yet less than 10 per cent of black Americans voted for Trump. As writer Ta-Nehesi Coates caustically points out:
Trump won white women (+9) and white men (+31). He won white people with college degrees (+3) and white people without them (+37). He won whites ages 18–29 (+4), 30–44 (+17), 45–64 (+28), and 65 and older (+19). Trump won whites in midwestern Illinois (+11), whites in mid-Atlantic New Jersey (+12), and whites in the Sun Belt’s New Mexico (+5). In no state that Edison polled did Trump’s white support dip below 40 percent. Hillary Clinton’s did, in states as disparate as Florida, Utah, Indiana, and Kentucky. From the beer track to the wine track, from soccer moms to NASCAR dads, Trump’s performance among whites was dominant. According to Mother Jones, based on preelection polling data, if you tallied the popular vote of only white America to derive 2016 electoral votes, Trump would have defeated Clinton 389 to 81.13
There are multiple studies, including a Gallup one involving a huge sample of 125,000 Americans, that simply dispel the myth that economic hardship was the determinant for Trump’s election. A factor, sure; the factor, no way. The determining factor was whiteness, and as Coates explains, ‘to accept that whiteness brought us Donald Trump is to accept whiteness as an existential danger to the country and the world.’
While I do not accept the logic that Trump is a danger to the world but Obama was not – American foreign policy is a danger to the world full stop – and while I do not buy into the hysteria that sees Trump as a radical break with American history, I must admit I was still surprised by his election. I expected Clinton to win and continue the mundane, run-of-the-mill, ‘democratic’ white supremacy and classism where unjust deportations, millions of citizens lacking healthcare, chronic homelessness, bombing random brown countries, cheering for the torture and execution of foreign heads of state without even a sham trial, mass incarceration and the disproportionate execution by police of unarmed black civilians continue to be American norms. But Trump won and while not every Trump voter is a card-carrying Nazi, they are totally fine with a president whose white-supremacist sympathies were entirely plain long before he took office and have only become clearer in the time since.
The ‘good news’ to keep in mind is that half of eligible adult Americans did not vote at all, and that had Bernie Sanders won the nomination there is good reason to believe he could have beaten Trump and, ultimately, Mr Trump actually still lost the popular vote. However paradoxical it may seem, Trump’s election, horrendous as its effects will certainly be for millions of Americans, may turn out to have some unintended positive long-term effects. I know you probably think I have gone crazy here, so bear with me. If Trump’s White House does not start a nuclear war – something a president certainly cannot do all by himself despite what you may have seen in the movies – the election of a reality TV star that makes spelling mistakes on his Twitter and retweets the likes of Britain First puts white supremacy so obviously and nakedly in the spotlight that people are simply forced to confront it. At the time of writing this, Trump has not yet had his state visit to the UK, yet by the time you read this he will have, and I bet the protest against his presence, to the most odious side of America and to at least a certain aspect of the ‘special relationship’, was huge, wasn’t it?
I detest the policies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama but I cannot deny they were both brilliant men; incredibly intelligent, charismatic, competent and confident. Even someone that sees Anglo-American foreign policy as the greatest threat to world peace – as I do, along with a quarter of humanity – could easily be taken in by men of their quality. Trump’s election, on the other hand, may well have woken up Western liberals to the dangers posed to the future of humanity by unchecked white supremacist grumblings, dangers the rest of the world have long since known. But maybe I’m just trying to see the best. Maybe the next three years will bring us ever closer to the brink of nuclear war, maybe Trump pulling the country out of even limited frameworks of international peace and cooperation such as UNESCO, the Paris climate accords and the UN compact on migration will do irreparable damage to the world and make Obama and Clinton look wonderful in hindsight. But as I was watched the Trump inauguration on a TV screen in Addis Ababa, it all looked so satirical that I could not help but see the signs of an empire in decline. The question, then, is how painful might the fall be? America’s great contradiction is that it is in some respects a successful multi-racial polity, one that has produced inspirational cultures of critical scholarship and art, often in resistance to the very white supremacist underpinnings of American ruling class ideology. But the most visible, celebrated and prosperous black people in the world also come from a country that has bombed multiple black and brown countries since 1945 (and even its own citizens) and is home to a network of racialised prison labour camps unparalleled in human history. It’s easy for people in Europe to look to America as ‘the racist country’, especially at the moment, but how will people in Europe react if and when their nations undergo similar demographic changes to those that the US has? My guess is not very well. It is America’s biggest contradiction that the country is perhaps the best example of a successful multi-racial polity in the world today, and also a brutal white-supremacist empire at the same time. Which of these trends shall win?
Which brings us back to the UK.
It’s understandable given the timing of two campaigns, the central focus of both on demonising immigrants, the close political relationships of Britain and America and the particularly close relationship between Nigel Farage and the Trump administration that so many people have conceptually linked Trump and Brexit, codenamed Trexit. Before we look at Brexit, I would like to make some obvious observations. By analysing the role that xenophobia and racism played in Brexit – a role much more ambiguous than in the election of Trump – I am not suggesting that everyone that voted leave is akin to the Grand Wizard of the KKK, nor that remain voters are a homogeneous group of revolutionary anti-racists. This should be so obvious it should hardly need stating, but given our national immaturity around discussions of race it perhaps does. I have met black socialists that voted leave, I have met absolute xenophobes that voted remain, and everything in between. The ruling class was itself massively divided on the issue, with the Murdoch press and Tony Blair – usually in such sublime agreement when it comes to waging war – occupying opposite camps. I myself am neither remain nor leave per se, as I wrote at the time; I think there are valid reasons to leave the EU but I was driven to a remain position by a) the xenophobic tone of the leave campaign – though both sides were of shockingly poor intellectual quality – and b) an assessment of Britain’s current political landscape. So while there were obviously multiple motivations around such a complex issue what I do wish to emphasise, as a few others also have, is the role that race, xenophobia, anti-intellectualism and ahistorical analyses played in the Brexit campaign, popular perceptions of it and ultimately its outcome. We’ve heard it said repeatedly that leaving the EU will allow Britain to stop neglecting the Commonwealth, but those of us that actually come from Commonwealth countries tend to shudder when we hear this. Why?
Well, apart from the imperial history you read earlier, it’s because what have we seen to reflect this new-found love for the Commonwealth in recent years? ‘Immigrants go home’ vans trawling the streets of Tower Hamlets; I wonder who they were looking for? Anyone who has been to Tower Hamlets knows that they certainly were not looking for Swedish people or white New Zealanders. In 2015, David Cameron announced that the UK would be building a £25 million prison in Jamaica to rehouse Jamaican nationals currently in Britain’s prisons. The problems with this were multi-faceted; first, there are more Irish and Polish nationals i
n Britain’s prisons, so why the focus on Jamaica? Second, there were only 700 Jamaican nationals in the UK’s prisons anyway, so one may also question if the project is worth £25 million of taxpayers’ money in a country that is already the most heavily incarcerated in Western Europe by quite some distance. Third, and perhaps worst of all, the Jamaican government responded to what was being reported and said that it was inaccurate and that no such deal had been signed, rather that discussions had just been opened. More recently we have seen deaths at immigration detention centres and charter planes full of Jamaican nationals, Kenyans, Nigerians, Ghanaians and other Commonwealth nationalities, many of whom had spent decades here and had British children and British partners, being sent ‘back’ to countries that some of them had not visited since childhood. As you saw from the last chapter, Commonwealth migration policy has historically been defined much more by race than anything else.14
If the British government were serious about wanting to engage for the first time in a mutually beneficial relationship with the non-white parts of the Commonwealth, this is a strange way to go about it. Furthermore, there are now millions of Indian, Ghanaian and Jamaican Brits who could and would serve as natural mediators, trade partners and facilitators with their countries of origin. But to my knowledge our expertise, insight and ties to our nations of origin have not been sought out by these would-be Commonwealth lovers. If the British state’s intentions for Africa and Asia are what they say they are – democracy, prosperity, peace and stability – it would surely welcome the input of those of us who obviously desire these things for our family and friends ‘back home’.
When one examines the data around Brexit voting patterns and how they relate to geographic locations, age, ethnicity and party allegiance, it seems even harder to sell the idea that Commonwealth love was any kind of a motivating factor at all. According to the Lord Ashcroft exit poll data:
• 96 per cent of UKIP voters voted leave (hardly surprising)
• Control over immigration was cited as the second most important reason for voting leave
• Of the people who thought multiculturalism was an ill, 81 per cent voted leave
• Of the people who thought immigration was an ill, 80 per cent voted leave
• Of those who thought feminism was a force for ill, 71 per cent voted leave
• Of the thirty areas with the most old people, twenty-seven voted leave
• Of the thirty areas with the least university-educated people, twenty-eight voted leave
• Of the thirty areas with the most people identifying as English not British, all voted leave
The remain voter stats were almost an exact inverse and concluded that:
• 71 per cent of the people that thought immigration was a net good voted remain
• 71 per cent of those that thought multiculturalism was a force for good voted remain
• 75 per cent of 18–24 year olds voted remain (61 per cent of over 65s voted leave)
• The regions of England that are multicultural skewed remain, those that are not skewed leave15
Despite all of the claims that economic hardship determined the result, as scholars Satnam Virdee and Brendan McGeever point out:
While exit polls confirmed that around two-thirds of those who voted in social classes D and E chose to leave the EU we should also note that the proportion of Leave voters who were of the lowest two social classes was just 24 per cent. Leave voters among the elite and middle classes were crucial to the final outcome, with almost three in five votes coming from those in social classes A, B and C1.16
Among black Brits 74 per cent voted remain, the highest of any ethnic group, so what could explain this? Do black Britons – who are overwhelmingly working class – just love the EU? I would suggest not. Many black Britons are well aware that European unity, if not of course the EU itself, was fostered in no small part by the pan-European project of racialised enslavement and the joint Scramble for Africa of the European powers. So it seems rather unlikely that an undying commitment to European unity is what drove this group. My suspicion is that a lifetime of being treated like immigrants in their own country generally makes black Brits quite sensitive to anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Which brings us on to a question of nationalism: why did the Northern Irish and Scots behave so differently to the English, even though their nations are much less ethnically diverse? How come the anti-immigrant fervour did not register in the same way in the lilywhite parts of Scotland and Northern Ireland as it did in England? Clearly in Northern Ireland concern over the potential return of a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic was a factor, but you can’t say the same for Scotland.
That England, a country not properly invaded since 1066 but which has invaded almost every nation on the planet, can have a party named the UK Independence Party win 13 per cent of the national vote in 2015 speaks volumes about collective amnesia and ability to distort the facts. The ability of Britain to invade almost the entire planet and then for a significant portion of the country to proclaim themselves victims of some kind of invasion or colonisation may well not seem directly ‘racial’, but it certainly echoes quite clearly the way white America, with its long-term history of racist pogroms, lynching, slavery and segregation, has somehow emerged believing itself to be the victim of racial discrimination.17 Britain entered the EU freely, it has voted leave freely, the only blood that was shed around this issue was when a white-supremacist ultra-nationalist lunatic assassinated an MP perceived to be too kind to ‘immigrants’ during the campaign – hardly a country under siege like so many of those on the receiving end of Britain’s imperial conquests.
Which brings us onto the final point about Brexit; immigration was central to the campaign and such an important issue for voters, but as Dr Nadine El-Enany, Senior Lecturer in Law at Birkbeck University, pointed out at the time, Britain had never ‘lost control’ of its borders:
Britain never joined Schengen, and not only continues to exercise border controls in relation to EU nationals, but also has a flexible opt-out from EU law on immigration and asylum – which it has consistently exercised to opt into restrictive measures that further strengthen its capacity to exclude, and out of those aimed at enhancing protection standards. In view of this, Britain’s decision to depart from the EU primarily over the question of immigration and border control demands scrutiny. The Leave campaign argued that exiting the EU would allow Britain to ‘take back control of its borders’ and would ‘make Britain great again’. The referendum debate was eclipsed by the topic of migration, and not exclusively that of European citizens. The epitome of the Leave campaign’s scaremongering about migration was perhaps the moment Nigel Farage unveiled a poster depicting non-white refugees crossing the Croatia-Slovenia border in 2015 along with the slogan ‘Breaking Point’ .18
We can look at the above demographics, remember that picture and claim racial fear-mongering was not a central factor if we wish, but I sincerely doubt that if Farage had used a queue of scantily clad Russian models running across the border that the ‘breaking point’ line would have hit home in quite the same way.
Perhaps the worst part about this whole debacle is that by now it should be abundantly clear to all that Brexit will pave the way for an even more extreme version of the Thatcherite sell-off of UK assets and services, and the domination of the UK economy by US and transnational capital. It was not, to my mind at least, a choice between the EU and ‘independence’, but a choice between staying part of a flawed union or choosing to deepen ties with the American Empire and continue the ‘Americanisation’ of the British economy. If Britons wish to learn what a US-style healthcare service looks like, they are free to talk to any poor American.
Many scholars, particularly those of colour, have made a similar analysis of the whiteness of Brexit, and no doubt persons racialised as white will accuse them of reading race into everything, but every so often Britain’s obsession with whiteness comes to the fore
all by itself. The 2011 census revealed that people identifying as ‘white British’ are now a minority in London. Almost every major newspaper ran an article on this revelation, asking what this meant for the future of the capital, though obviously in as racially muted language as possible. I remember hearing radio debates on the ‘issue’, and in all of the kerfuffle no one mentioned something obvious: lamenting this apparent decline in the ‘white British’ population obviously asserts just how clearly we see whiteness and Britishness as being synonymous, which is usually something we deny. A decline in British Indians living in London would hardly be deemed newsworthy by every major paper. I take this moment to remind you that most immigrants that came to Britain even before Britain joined the EU came from Europe and were thus ‘white’.
The good news is that, despite what all the doomsday white nationalists are saying, the ‘mixing of the races’ has consistently worked not to reinforce interpersonal racism but to undermine it, my home city being one of the best examples of this in the world. There are racists and bigots in London, for sure, and the power structures in London are racialised, without a doubt, but nonetheless Londoners on the whole have clearly gotten used to people that are supposedly different. An attempt to recruit for a far-right party in Ladbroke Grove, Camden or Lambeth would be a funny experiment to watch. The other funny thing about these doomsday reports of white decline is that while the papers in question would probably baulk at the idea that white people are uniquely racist, this is what their narrative implicitly implies. We so-called ethnic minorities are just expected to live with difference and accept it. I never went to school with any other people who were Caribbean-Scots-English, but it did not kill me. These articles imply that, or at least ask if, white people are incapable of doing what British Indians, Ghanaians and Cypriots have had to do in London, which is to get used to ‘different’ peoples and cultures.
