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"White supremacy" or racism?

Hasan Suroor

Professor Cornel West says racism is what they have in America while in Britain the problem is essentially one of latent "white supremacy." This means that racial prejudices in Britain operate in more subtle forms than American-style in-your-face racism.

SPOT THE difference between racism and white supremacy, and if you think they are one and the same thing, think again. For, apparently they are not — though, in the end, their effect on race relations is equally damaging.

Racism, according to a distinguished African-American academic, is what they have in America while in Britain the problem is essentially one of latent "white supremacy." This means that racial prejudices in Britain operate in more subtle forms than American-style in-your-face racism.

"Britain is a paradoxical place when it comes to issues of race. On the one hand, there is a wonderful kind of geographical integration that you see when you walk the streets. At the same time, if you ask white Britons how many of them have more than two black friends, the answer is: not many," Cornel West, professor of Religion and African-American Studies at Princeton University and an authority on race issues, said during a visit to Britain last week.

Comparing the racial attitudes in Britain with those in America, Prof. West said there were "hidden ways in which white supremacy" worked in Her Majesty's kingdom. "It is different in the U.S., but we have such a racist history of slavery and discrimination. You have a legacy of white supremacy that is quite different. It is tied to a colonial history," he told a Sunday newspaper.

Prof. West did not say whether he regarded the British experience a lesser evil than what was happening in America, but his remarks were seized by some to claim support for the view that racism in Britain is a lot less vicious than in many other Western countries — and that "white supremacy" is just a local difficulty that can be managed.

In recent weeks, we have heard a great deal along these lines in relation to the reportedly growing popularity of the far-right British National Party (BNP) among white working class voters. It has been argued that not all potential BNP voters are racist even if they believe that Britain is being taken over by "foreigners." Most of them, we are told, are acting out of rage against the perceived pampering of ethnic groups by mainstream parties rather than out of any racist motive.

It is an old argument. In India, supporters of known communal groups have always claimed that they, themselves, are not communal and theirs is simply a protest vote against the ruling establishment. It is true that not everyone who votes for a party supports all its policies and concerns. But when a party such as the BNP has only a one-point agenda — to send all immigrants back to their own countries and restore Britain to its white glory — it is disingenuous for its supporters to claim that they are not buying into its anti-immigrant platform.

What else has the BNP to offer, except its racist policies? The Conservative Party's deputy chairman, Eric Pickles, had a point when he said that it would not do to pretend that those who backed the BNP did it for reasons other than its promise to keep Britain white.

"We are not differentiating between the candidates who stand for the BNP and the people who vote for them. We believe it is a shameful act to vote for the BNP, no matter how badly you feel you have been let down by Labour. These people are motivated by race and it is not an acceptable use of a protest vote to vote for the BNP," he told The Sunday Telegraph.

The Tories have their own political reasons to attack the BNP and its supporters ahead of this week's local elections, but that does not take away from the strength of Mr. Pickles' argument.

The truth is that, as Prof. West pointed out, white supremacy is very much "alive and well" in Britain even if it is "hidden." Indeed, he attacked the covert forms in which racial bias works here and said it marginalised and degraded its victims. Although anything on the scale of what happened in America after the Hurricane Katrina, when thousands of non-whites were simply left to die in New Orleans, may never be allowed to happen in Britain, racism remains a serious problem.

Several major government departments such as the police have been dubbed "institutionally racist." The argument is that it is not simply a few individuals in these organisations who are racist, racism is institutionalised. Racist attitudes in the army, the police, and the health service have also been exposed through secretly filmed television programmes.

And recently, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, warned that Britain was "sleepwalking" into a New Orleans-style situation because of policies that, in the garb of promoting multiculturalism, were actually encouraging cultural ghettos with whites and non-whites increasingly living parallel lives.

The point is not whether all of these allegations are entirely true, but that there is a perception that Britain is becoming more — rather than less — xenophobic. "White supremacy" or plain racism, it is not good news.

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