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ABSTRACT
The advent of a post-racial understanding of racism has changed the way in which Europe sees itself and its ethnic minorities. The concept of the post-racial emerged in the United States to describe a belief that America was no longer a racist society and the election of Barack Obama to the highest office in the land was a public and highly visible confirmation of that state of affairs. A global post-racial culture has taken hold of western plutocracies in which racism is universally denounced but increasingly difficult to pin down. Sayyid's study, by using a decolonial analytics, examines the different ways in which racism is imagined and how this imagination shapes the way in which the post-racial appears. The paper goes on to sketch out an alternative account of the post-racial as an aspect of the various trends that have been described as being post-political.
Notes
1 Derrida, dir. Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering (New York: Zeitgeist Films, 2002). For the screenplay, see Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, Derrida: Screenplay and Essays on the Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2005).
2 To be fair to Derrida, the Australian reporter probably provoked his ire because her question seemed to demonstrate a knowledge neither of deconstruction (that is, deconstruction is not about nothing) or of Seinfeld, which is also not about nothing but highly textured and tightly plotted with series of overlapping arcs.
3 For a contrary view, see Robert Epperson, ‘Seinfeld the moral life’, in William Irwin (ed.), Seinfeld and Philosophy (Chicago: Open Court 2000), 170.
4 ‘The yada yada’, Seinfeld, dir. Andy Ackerman, season 8, episode 19, broadcast on NBC, 24 April 1997.
5 There is also an episode in which Elaine, one of the regulars in the series, is dating someone in the belief that he is biracial—he is also dating Elaine in the assumption that she is biracial—when in fact apparently neither of them are.
6 The boundaries of this culture are not purely national, since a sitcom like Seinfeld is shown widely throughout the world and, while its writers are focused on New York sensibilities, these sensibilities have the ability to transcend the metropolitan confines of New York.
7 This global Americanization has influenced not only patterns of consumption (Coca Cola, McDonald’s), entertainment (Hollywood, pop music) and also visions of the world (neoliberalism). The American position in the world rests not only on its military might but also on what Joseph Nye describes as soft power, the ability to change preferences not through coercion or its threat, but through attraction and emulation. The critique of racism can be seen as being part of US soft power.
8 For example, Nigel Farage, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, which has campaigned on an anti-immigration platform, took exception to being described as racist, and argued that anti-immigration was not meant to be anti-immigrant, and was certainly not racist. This principled rejection of racism went hand-in-hand with frequent and regular appearance of the tropes associated with racism: for example, Nigel Farage found the absence of voices speaking in English on his suburban train journey uncomfortable. See Andrew Sparrow, ‘Nigel Farage: parts of Britain are “like a foreign land”’, Guardian, 24 February 2014.
9 Finlo Rorher, ‘Is gingerism as bad as racism?’, BBC News (online), 6 June 2007, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/6725653.stm (viewed 2 November 2016).
10 See Robert Miles, Racism (London: Routledge 1989), 42.
11 Ian Morris, War: What Is It Good For? The Role of Conflict in Civilisation, from Primates to Robots (London: Profile Books 2014).
12 Barnor Hesse and S. Sayyid, ‘Narrating the postcolonial political and the immigrant imaginary’, in N. Ali, V. S. Kalra and S. Sayyid (eds), A Postcolonial People: South Asians in Britain (New York: Columbia University Press 2008), 13–31.
13 George M. Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2002); Barnor Hesse, ‘Racism's alterity: the after-life of black sociology’, in Wulf D. Hund and Alana Lentin (eds), Racism and Sociology, Racism Analysis, Yearbook 5 (Münster and Berlin: LIT Verlag 2015), 141–74.
14 For a provocative articulation of an Islamo-Christian civilization as the bedrock of the modern world system, see Richard Bulliet, The Case for Islamo-Chrisitan Civilization (New York: Columbia University Press 1996).
15 Hesse, ‘Racism's alterity’.
16 See Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (London: Pelican Books 1976), 119–20.
17 This is a concept introduced by Antonio Gramsci to describe the complex relations between economy, culture and political forces that underpin a specific hegemony. For details, see Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. from the Italian by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart 1976), 181.
18 David A. Hollinger, ‘The concept of post-racial: how its easy dismissal obscures important questions', Daedalus, vol. 140, no. 1, 2011, 174–82 (176).
19 For description and elaboration of the concept of postcolonial ethnic minorities, see Hesse and Sayyid, ‘Narrating the postcolonial political and the immigrant imaginary’.
20 Francis Fukuyama, ‘The end of history?’, National Interest, Summer 1989, 3–18; Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press 1992).
21 Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London and NY: Routledge 2005), 48–51.
22 Hollinger, ‘The concept of post-racial’, 176.
23 I was introduced to the phrase ‘the banality of government’ by Michael Keith, no doubt based on his experience as leader of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets: see Micheal Keith, After the Cosmopolitian? Multicultural Cities and the Future of Racism (London and New York: Routledge 2005). 40.
24 For a study of some of the ontic aspects of these developments, see detailed findings of research conducted under the auspices of the TOLERACE project in Sayyid, Law and Sian, Racism, Governance, and Public Policy. What was clear is how the background assumptions of ideas and themes associated with post-racial posturing have penetrated into capillary actions of organizations of various kinds (voluntary, state and so on).
25 Ernesto Laclau, ‘Why constructing a people is the main task of radical politics', Critical Inquiry, vol. 32, no. 4, 2006, 646–80.
26 For an elaboration of the difference between political constitution and social construction, see Barnor Hesse, ‘Preface: Counter-racial formation theory’, in P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon P. Woods (eds), Conceptual Aphasia in Black: Displacing Racial Formation (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books 2016), vii–xi.
27 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso 2013).
28 For more details of this account of the relationship between politics and the political, see Mouffe, On the Political; and Laclau, ‘Why constructing a people is the main task of radical politics’.
29 Mouffe, On the Political, 9.
30 S. Sayyid, ‘Empire, Islam and the postcolonial’, in Graham Huggan (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2013), 127–41.
31 The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry: Report of an Inquiry by Sir William Macpherson of Cluny, Cmd 4262-I (London: Stationery Office 1999), 6.34, available on the gov.uk website at www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/277111/4262.pdf (viewed 10 November 2016). It is worth contrasting this take on institutional racism with that first articulated by Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) and Charles Hamilton in Black Power (1967), in which institutional racism is part of the exercise of white power rather than the merely unintended consequences of the working of organizational machinery: see Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: the Politics of Liberation (New York: Vintage Books 1992).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
S. Sayyid
S. Sayyid is based at the University of Leeds, where he holds a Chair in Social Theory and Decolonial Thought. His recent major publications include A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism [1997], 3rd edn (Zed 2015), Thinking through Islamophobia: Global Perspectives (co-edited with AbdoolKarim Vakil, Hurst 2010), Racism, Governance and Public Policy (co-authored with Ian Law and Katy Sian) (Routledge 2013), and Recalling the Caliphate: Decolonization and the World Order (Hurst 2014). He is the founding editor of ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies. Email: [email protected]