There’s a story that Britain likes to tell itself. It used to have a problem with racism. After the 1993 racist murder of Stephen Lawrence, his friend, who survived the attack, was treated as a suspect, and his family’s campaign for justice was spied upon. A soul-searching public inquiry into the treatment of his death led the British state to hold up its hands and admit that the police force had a problem with institutional racism. Having owned up, Britain could write off its racism as a dark chapter of the past.
The UK’s anti-racist movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s had found institutional racism in the foundations of the police force, arguing that it brought “home” colonial methods. The state, on the other hand, had now defined institutional racism as a result of the collected personal attitudes of those who staffed its forces, which were in turn representative of the general public.
Britain had looked in the mirror but failed to see its own reflection, instead building its redemptive arc on the basis of a distortion: its own structure was not the problem, but the individual ignorance or political extremism of its subjects. The solution, therefore, was a combination of top-down education and punishment. This redefinition hid the state’s active hand in racism, and gave it a renewed mandate as an impartial adjudicator. Alongside a toolkit of “anti-hate” legislation, “British values” soon also became the yardstick by which to measure the intolerance of other cultures.
How a state defines injustice has consequences. What we might welcome in one moment as a step forward can come back to bite us if it lacks enough meaning. The disastrously-ambiguous “anti-hate” framework is now invoked throughout the West in order to criminalise solidarity with Palestine, in the disingenuous claims to tackle antisemitism. It has reaffirmed that, regardless of how many institutions publicly condemn racism, anti-migrant rhetoric was never limited to incoming people: if they sympathise with Gaza, the British-born children of migrants are questioned about their loyalties and the compatibility of their cultures. Where once the War on Terror placed conditions on Muslim belonging, Israel’s war on the Palestinians has seen similar conditions extended in the diaspora to those with “foreign” heritage. If anyone was having trouble seeing the outline of the War on Terror in the current phase of the West’s War on Migration, Trump’s promise to turn Guantanamo Bay into a deportation prison has cast it in lead.
Writing about Germany, Pankaj Mishra asks to what extent a country’s acknowledgement of guilt leads to the belief that the crimes of the past have been resolved, sidestepping a real “reckoning” with them, and leading to the expression of new forms of racism. The question applies in general. In what ways have our governments built new kinds of oppression on the legacies of older ones?
