White supremacy in retreat? past histories and contemporary racisms in the public pedagogies of Britain and America

ABSTRACT

Racisms are plural, taking different forms in different countries, subject to change in focus and intensity over time. Colonialism and slavery influence attitudes and policies in both countries through to modern times. In examining the British and American contexts, one needs to particularise by a) country, b) ethnicities, c) histories, d) contemporary economic forces which sustain racisms and e) anti-racist and decolonising practices in the school curriculum, instructional relationships and wider public education contexts. Racisms are about power and exploitation, generally exercised by a White population through the devaluing of minorities and denial of their rights, needs and pain. Despite Civil Rights laws and Affirmative Action, the USA has a brand of racism that is at times barbaric, extreme and recurrent, bolstered by discriminatory law and law enforcement. Britain’s racisms, despite Race Relations Acts, discriminate across a range of sectors with interventions funded which have been too limited, seldom sustained and with variable impacts. Until attributes of ‘Whiteness’ are openly interrogated, the folk histories of the countries rebalanced, the school curriculum reconsidered and historical roots for contemporary ‘erasure of Black suffering’ are recognised, ‘White premium’ will persist. That is the challenge to public pedagogies in educational establishments and the wider society.

KEYWORDS:

• White supremacy
• racisms
• colonialism
• slavery
• elites
• erasure of black pain
• school curriculum

Introduction

Every form of racism is particular to its time, history, place and social and economic contexts and as such should be viewed as plural. Colour-coded racism, xeno-racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia and anti-Irish or Polish or Roma co-exist alongside different interventions and forms of resistance. Racisms, when not resisted effectively, lead to unequal treatment based on no more than reactions to skin colour, physical features, accent, religion or just ‘not-from-here’. Different treatment, and the underlying ‘White privilege’, have different historical roots which exert influence through to modern times in the USA and Britain. America’s civil rights dreams are unfulfilled and Britain’s laws against discrimination remain commitments weakly enforced by the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) and its successor, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC 2019) in the USA probably surpasses the UK equivalent in its impotence.

Common to many racisms is the assumed superiority of the White majority underpinned by past exploitation and repression (slavery, slave trading and colonialism) or contemporary ‘foreignness’ and supposed competition, whether over jobs, housing or welfare resources.

This paper draws on historical reports of inequalities in both nations and relevant datasets. It examines the conditions which sustain contemporary racisms, differential treatment and outcomes. Underlying similarities are sought, but also significant differences to which each country must be attuned to combat the racism within the institutional areas to be addressed. Achieving racial equality overlaps with class equality and is a long-term project, both subject to ‘structural violence’ (Ho 2007), where systematic, known disadvantage is sustained by state sanctioned practices and financial policies.

A theoretical position

Exclusionary forces of racism arise from an economic sub-stratum serving elite interests. Understanding and responding to Britain’s racism is not effectively demonstrated by theoretical approaches which rest overly on psychology and current social policy, nor on a narrow school curriculum focus. Critical Race Theory (CRT) offers a broad but still limiting perspective on imposed and sustained racial inequalities (Gillborn 2005; Taylor, Gillborn, and Ladson-Billing 2009); without recourse to social class analysis and identifying neoliberal forces promoting division and social and economic disadvantage the explanatory power – and therefore proposed and enacted solutions – will be blunted. Cole (2017) calls for race consciousness and class consciousness and this has to be within national histories, contemporary power dispositions and changing migration patterns.

To develop acceptance, respect, inclusion and trust, Britain, quite separately from the USA, has to deal with its own amnesiac, supremacist history, recognise its constituent ethnicities and confront contemporary inequalities to stem the displacement of blame onto those ‘not from here’. The various ‘decolonising’ projects in both countries demonstrate awareness and the potential for movement in the school curriculum and in the higher education experience (Arday and Mirza 2018; Abdi 2011). Writing of racial climates in academia in the USA, Williams stresses how adverse, racially hostile environments ‘perpetuate intergenerational advantages for Whites throughout the lifespan (Williams 2019, 58)

There has been a remarkable global upsurge in public displays of support for Black Lives Matter since George Floyd’s distressingly public death in Minneapolis in May 2020, with ritual taking the knee at the start of every football match in the UK and, after some controversy, similarly during the national anthem before American National Football League matches. Whether this counts as White supremacy in retreat is questionable (Bhopal 2018; Moncrieffe 2020).

As the term ‘institutional racism’ implies, the actions and attitudes which adversely affect people of colour are entrenched in societies and not merely attributable to individuals, groups or areas. Racism is ‘a collective failure to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin’ (Macpherson 1999). The failure is embedded in neoliberal structures of control.

Racial diversity and change in Britain and the USA

In the 1950s Britain, ‘race’ was seen as something that happened elsewhere, in the colonies or the USA (Hall and McClelland 2010, 1). Britain had Black African citizens numbering in the tens of thousands since the 18^th century (File and Power 1981). Recent statistics from 2001 to 2011 show that the White British percentage of the 56 million England and Wales population decreased from 87.4% to 80.5%. The Other White group, mainly eastern European, increased from 2.6% to 4.4%. Asian ethnic groups, collectively, made up the second largest percentage of the population, at 7.5%. Black Caribbeans remained almost constant at 1.1%, while those of Black African background doubled to 1.8% in 2011. Mixed ethnicity groups almost doubled to 1.8%. The London population in 2011 was only 45% White British. School census figures for England, a good predictor of future population, reveal a doubling of BAME pupils in 12 years to over two and half million, constituting 33% of the total school population (DfE 2019, Table 5).

In the United States, ethnicities are categorised into larger blocks than in Britain. The total population recorded in 2010 was 308.7 million, increasing in 2019 to 328.5 million, with 13.4% Black Americans (44 million) and 18.3% Hispanic (60 million), the latter doubling in the period 2000 to 2019 (United States Census Bureau 2019). The Black American population largely comprises not new immigrants, but long-established people with a particular history and relationship with the majority White population, many descendants of ‘involuntary migrants’ from centuries ago (Gibson and Ogbu 1991). Though a ‘melting pot’, with the continuing influx of immigrants, from Europe and Asia, ‘race’ has been about the relationship with the Black and, to a lesser extent, Hispanic groups. The tension, pain and blame in relation to the former are very much rooted in events and experiences on home soil. The Hispanic population, mainly Mexican, experiences a degree of segregation (Garcia 2018) if less pronounced than for Black Americans.

Racisms in the UK and USA

Darder and Torres saw racism as an ideology serving class interests, ‘behind the smokescreen of multiculturalism, diversity, difference, and more recently, Whiteness’ (Darder and Torres 2004, 1) recognisable and applicable in both countries. The magnitude and nature of differences between the two ‘developed’, English-speaking countries, in terms of race, is often ignored. A selective listing of ‘race’ events unavoidably ignores peaks in the undulations of ongoing xenophobia.

In 1807, slave trading across the British Empire was banned and in 1834 the Abolition of Slavery Act passed and applied to the colonies. Much later, two world wars brought Black and minority immigrants to Britain, contributing greatly to the warfare efforts. In 1948, the Nationality Act designated inhabitants of British colonies ‘Citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies’ and in the same year the Windrush docked in London with workers from the West Indies, carrying those passports. The 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, distinctly less welcoming, restricted free entry of citizens from the Commonwealth. The economic motive for the promotion of immigration had weakened.

The 1965 Race Relations Act ‘outlawed’ discrimination on ‘grounds of colour, race, or ethnic or national origins’ in public places in Great Britain (but not Northern Ireland). In 1967, a response to racial tensions was the founding of the British Black Panthers, followed a year later by Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech, warning: ‘In 15 or 20 years time, the Black man will have the whip hand over the White man’. In 1976, another Race Relations Act was passed and, in 1979, a Royal Commission advised on the abolition of the ‘sus’ law (Dodd 2019) – police ‘stop and search’ practices, disproportionately inflicted on young Black males. A tragic, pivotal point of the UK’s history of race and racism was the 1993 murder of Black, 18 year-old Stephen Lawrence in south London, which set in motion an epic struggle for justice.

In 2018, Windrush descendants have been denied citizenship in what many have seen as a ‘scandal’. The stance taken towards those who died in the Grenfell Tower fire in west London is divisive and telling. Ambivalent attitudes and political positions are a continuing national presence in messages about who ‘belongs’, who is deserving, which groups are judged compliant and which ‘problems’.

For Americans, a different set of conditions existed with regard to ethnicity. First Nation Americans were decimated by early European settlers. Slaves were transported to work on plantations. In 1776, free of British rule, the Declaration of Independence stated, ‘all men are created equal … endowed … with certain unalienable rights … Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’, which was always intended to apply selectively. The mantra was recycled in Lincoln’s Gettysburg address in 1863, its continuing contradictions highlighted in the Adams and Sanders (2003) telling title, Alienable Rights.

The Thirteenth Amendment formally ended slavery in 1865 and made four million Black Americans ‘free’, constituting a significant proportion of the then 31 million United States population. The preceding 250 years of atrocities, degradation and dehumanisation left an enduring mark on both White and Black peoples, continued by the Klu Klux Klan and Jim Crow laws of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries enforcing segregation and exclusion from many civic rights.

In two world wars, Black Americans joined up in large numbers. Military experience and migration north for factories fuelled hopes of greater equality, and in 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education made segregation in public schools illegal.

The Civil Rights Act passed in 1957, the 200,000-strong march on Washington in 1963 witnessed Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech and another Civil Rights Act was signed by President Johnson in 1964.

In 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated. In 1966, the Black Panthers were established and Mohammed Ali refused to be drafted for the Vietnam war asserting that, ‘No Viet Cong ever called me nigger’. In 1968, Dr King was assassinated. At the Olympics in the same year, two Black American sprinters held gloved hands aloft on the podium in support of the Black Panthers when receiving their medals. In 1985, Philadelphia Mayor Goode ordered law enforcement agents to bomb the headquarters of MOVE, a Black liberation group. Eleven dead.

In 2000, the World Trade Centre terrorism attacks (9/11), with over 3,000 deaths, saw the beginning of what some termed ‘racialised wars’, arguably following the patterns of the Korea and Vietnam conflicts.

In 2008, a Black president was elected, leading many (White) Americans to say, ‘Well, how can we be racist?’ In 2018, Black American football players ‘took a knee’ as the national anthem was played as a protest at police shootings of Black citizens in a similar way to the 1968 sprinters.

England has had its share of race-related protests: Liverpool and Cardiff (1919), Notting Hill, London (1958) and Brixton, London; Toxteth, Liverpool (1981). In 1985, the Broadwater Estate in London erupted following Black Cynthia Jarrett’s death of heart failure when police entered to search her house, and police officer Colin Blakelock was killed in subsequent violence This was the first killing of a police officer in a civil rights disturbance in the twentieth century in Britain.

In 2001, riots in Oldham followed tensions between White and South Asian communities. Ten years later, Mark Duggan was shot by police; riots followed in Tottenham, London, spreading to other cities.

The USA has more deaths and greater brutality in dealing with protests. In 1919, in Chicago, 38 people died: 23 Black, 15 White. In 1943, the Detroit riots were suppressed by 6,000 Federal troops. The 1960s saw austerity riots in Birmingham, Harlem, Watts, Newark, Detroit. In 1968, after the assassination of Dr King, there were riots in Washington, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and other cities. In 2012, Latino Manuel Diaz, unarmed, was shot by police in Anaheim, California sparking riots (Delgadillo 2017).

In 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri, rioting followed the shooting of 18 year-old Michael Brown. In 2015, the shooting of Freddie Gray in Baltimore and Walter Scott in Charleston led to riots, and in 2016 there were the shootings of Abdullah Omar Mohamed in Salt Lake City and Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte. In 2017, in Charlottesville, a Unite the Right supporter drove a car into a crowd marching in support of the removal of a statue of General Lee.

Summarising these compressed accounts, one notes similarities between the two nations in respect of riots, but in terms of police shootings and Black resistance, the USA is more ‘deadly’, has legislation less explicit or effective in outlawing discrimination and permissive gun laws.

Looking at what is celebrated and what is forgotten in each nation’s past is illuminating. Britain’s colonies covered a quarter of the world and there is pride in all the British ‘gave’ them and corresponding disregard, even ignorance, of the economic exploitation and repression with 59% thinking the British Empire was, ‘something to be proud of’’ (YouGov 2014). A more recent survey, comparing countries, found UK respondents were more likely to say that the once colonised countries were ‘better off’ at 33% (YouGov 2020). William Wilberforce is celebrated for legislation to ban the slave trade across the British Empire (1807), but few would know that the empire-wide ban on slave-owning came 27 years later. Slave owners were compensated; freed slaves were not. British ships had taken over 3,000,000 Africans across the Atlantic over 200 years. In 2020 England, sanitised guilt conceals atrocities, giving no recognition of the part played by slave trading and colonialisation in Britain’s industrialisation.

Contrasting racisms

The USA has over six times the population of Britain, a less centralised, governmental system and a racial mix different from that in the UK, in its origins, diversity and recent changes.

Gun deaths and lynchings

Gun deaths are much greater in the USA. From 2011 to 2015, there were more than 8,000 homicides per year using guns. Half of murder victims in 2017 were Black, though only 13% of the population (CDC 2019). There were 719 homicides in England and Wales in 2017, of whom 32 were shot (ONS 2018) and a third were from the BAME communities, constituting only 14% of the UK population (Full Fact 2016). In the USA, the number of people lynched between 1882 and 1968 totalled 4,743, peaking at 231 in 1892 (EJI 2017), where Britain has nothing comparable. Horrific events in the USA include the 1955 murder by the KKK of 14 year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi; no convictions. In Florida, in 2012, White George Zimmerman shot and killed 17 year-old Black Trayvon Martin in the street of a gated community, judged to be a place he should not have been. Zimmerman was acquitted of murder.

Pfeifer (2006) cites the ‘racialized excesses of modern urban police forces in the twentieth century onwards as having characteristics of lynching’ (7–8). Merelli states that ‘More Black people were killed by cops in 2016 than were lynched in the worst year of Jim Crow’ (2016, 1). American police fatally shoot about three of their citizens per day (Peeples 2019, 24), more than many other countries’ police shoot in a year. Americans are shot at nearly double their proportion in the population year on year. In the four years 2016–19, police shot dead 900–1000 people each year. One-quarter was Black (Washington Post 2019). As Turner et al. point out, in criminal justice and policing professional training the background to these employment areas stretches back to the days of slavery but no attention is given to this; there was no understanding of ’the slave patrols in the early 1700s marked the first real advances in American policing’ – but with a reputation for brutality – ‘with the work of controlling “marginal” sections of the south shifted from slave patrollers to Klansmen and policemen’ (Turner, Giacopassi, and Vandiver 2006, 186) with influences shaping practices into modern times.

The total number of fatal shootings by police in England and Wales from 2004 to 2016 was 33 (IOPC 2019). With a population one-seventh of that in the USA, the annual police fatal shooting rate is proportionately one-fortieth of that in the USA. Police shootings of Black men are tangible, visible manifestations of racial bias. Three recent examples are retold below with links to the visual evidence.

Walter Scott was stopped in April 2015 because of a broken car light. Scott ran and at this point, a passer-by began filming (New York Times 2015 – with video link). The man was running away. The police officer fired eight shots and Scott fell some 20 m ahead. The officer ran up, handcuffed the man and a colleague arriving called for medical assistance. Scott died where he lay. The officer was dismissed, charged with murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison in December 2017, when his final appeal failed. North Charleston reached a 6.5 USD million settlement with Scott’s family.

In September 2016, Keith Lamont Scott was shot by police in Charlotte, North Carolina while sitting in his car, apparently not responding to police shouts for him to get out of the vehicle. His wife, Rakeyia Scott, filmed the incident. Her increasingly desperate voice is heard (New York Times 2016a – with video link). From police footage of the event, it is unclear whether there was a gun; the likelihood is that there was not (New York Times 2016b – with video link); no charges. In Minneapolis in May 2020 George Floyd died in the street with a police officer’s knee on his neck (New York Post 2020 – with video link). The duration of the assult and hearing George Floyd’s pleading caused an outcry world-wide and reverberating still. The earlier shooting, by police officer Loehmann in Cleveland, Ohio, in 2014, of 12 year-old Tamir Rice playing with a toy gun in a park shocked many. Googling will show a nine-minute video leading up to the killing of that entirely innocent boy. No prosecution followed.

The videos in these cases are presented not for sensationalism but to aid understanding of the national difference. Shootings of Black men by American police officers have been referred to as executions and a continuation of lynching (Merelli 2016). Lest the British get too smug, ‘execution’ has been applied by an American author to the police shooting of Mark Duggan in London in 2011 (Rankine 2014, 116).

Prison

Deaths in police custody in the USA affect Black men disproportionately and some violent deaths are labelled ‘suicides’, even in the face of contrary evidence. Britain has no comparable history.

Black Americans are incarcerated in state prisons at five times the rate of White Americans. Half a million Black Americans were in prison in 2016, 39% of the prison population while only 13% of the population (Pew Research Center 2018). UK's imprisonment is about one-quarter of the American rate, even if high by European standards. Disproportionalities are recorded in the English criminal justice system, with Black men imprisoned at about three times the rate of other groups (NOMS 2017) and ‘The BAME proportion of youth prisoners has risen from 25% to 41% in the decade 2006–2016ʹ (Lammy 2017, 4/5). Disproportionality is lower in Britain than in the USA, but not by much.

Drug related imprisonment applies differentially to White compared with Black citizens in the USA with ‘White drugs’ – cocaine – incurring lesser sentences than ‘Black drugs’ – crack (CJPF 2016). Longer sentences are given for smaller amounts of crack cocaine, the drug of the poor and black, than for White people’s cocaine. Prisoners are released into permanent second-class status, stripped of civil and human rights – prompting Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (Alexander 2012) since it impacts Black men disporportionately.

Residential segregation and intermarriage

Segregation is more apparent in the United States than in Britain. Clark and colleagues report that 36% of African Americans live in areas where Black people represent two-thirds or more of the population and half live in Black majority neighbourhoods. In Britain, 6% of minorities live in places where they number more than two-thirds of the population and only 16% in wards with a majority of non-White people (Clark, Putnam, and Fieldhouse 2010, 29).

Intermarriage is greater in Britain, though it depends on the culture of the community in question – Black Caribbeans ‘out-marry’ the most, with one African-Caribbean man in three partnering outside his own group. In America, those in the most segregated group do not marry outside their group; only 2.7% of Black women report having a White husband (Clark, Putnam, and Fieldhouse 2010, 49).

Sullivan writes:

The legal structure of Jim Crow was dismantled in 1950s and 60s but “White domination” found a color-blind way to continue the legal disenfranchisement of Black people [and] preserved the core of chattel slavery. The daily racial privileges that White people generally enjoy … . are different only in degree, not in kind, from the daily racial privileges that slaveholders enjoyed two hundred years ago (Sullivan 2014, 68).

The UK does not have this element of history to relate back to.

The erasure of black pain

Amnesiac responses to histories of atrocities are common and impact on contemporary attitudes. The Walter Scott and Keith Lamont Scott videoed examples are testimony to the shocking readiness of American police to use firearms when the danger is minimal. Moore and Sullivan, on the erasure of Black pain, use the second case, which happened in their city, to develop a narrative of the racist ‘othering’ illustrating ‘White people’s unconscious investments in racial privilege [and] ritualisation of racial ideology’ (Moore and Sullivan 2018, 35). Sullivan was leading a study group of 30, mainly White and middle-class people in the Unitarian Universalist Church, itself similar to other Charlotte institutions in its continuing ‘racial self-segregation’. She showed Rakeyia Scott’s video of her husband being shot (New York Times 2016a). where her distressed voice is heard over the action. A group member asked, ‘Did you hear how many times she [Rakeyia] said the f-word? [and] the group lost track of the shooting and death of Keith Scott and became focused on Rakeyia Scott’s cursing’ (Moore and Sullivan 2018, 48). Following Pfeifer (2006), the authors interpret ‘police shootings of Black people as “Black dehumanization” [as] the modern day, state-sanctioned version of lynching’ (ibid. 43). Sullivan describes later the sanitisation of the slave era through a school trip to a plantation in North Carolina which spares children exposure to the harsh treatment of enslaved workers, preferring a pantomime of dressing up in slave clothing (Sullivan 2019, 17) exemplifying how ‘the erasure of Black suffering is a crucial form of support for ongoing White class privilege’ (2). The terms apartheid (Massey and Denton 1993) and caste (Ogbu 1978) have also been applied.

The British do not have experience of centuries of slavery, only of centuries of transportation and ownership of enslaved people in far off places. The British have had colonial rule, colonial wars and colonial exploitation, most notably in India and Africa. The British ruled 300 million Indians in 1890 with Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905, claiming that the empire was ‘the greatest instrument for good the world had ever seen’ (Goradia 1993, 103). Wilson scorns such high-minded claims as ‘pretensions’, ‘delusion’ and ‘fantasy’ (Wilson 2016, 498).

The 1876–1877 famine in India was the result of the British government's insistence on food exports continuing (deaths estimated at 3,500,000). The Bengal famine of 1943 similarly resulted from the export of food to troops at the front in Europe where it is said, they were sufficiently provisioned (3,000,000 deaths). The Amritsar massacre of 1919 (estimated 1,500 deaths) remains relatively unknown, unlike the Peterloo riot in Manchester in 1819 (15 killed; 400 injured).

The freedom fighters in the British colonies were ‘terrorists’, whether in India, Cyprus, Africa or Ireland. Rather than face openly accounts of viciousness, massacres, causing famines and even Opium Wars, there is ignorance or disregard. Instead, the British celebrate the heroism at Rorkes Drift in 1879, where 11 VCs were awarded to the soldiers who held out against 3,000 Zulus. The battle lives on in the public consciousness as an example of British valour, depicted in the 1964 film Zulu, starring Michael Caine, a model of doughty British manhood. Many books attest to heroism. Few allude to war crimes and cover-up (David 2004).

Counter-narratives

The counter narrative regarding racism in the USA is robust. Mac Donald (2017) presents the police case: under the chapter ‘Obama’s Ferguson sell-out’, she writes that ‘Obama betrayed a nation’ (7) and ‘no word of condemnation against savages who self-indulgently destroyed the livelihoods of struggling entrepreneurs … in Ferguson’ (15). Black Lies Matter (Starkes 2016) takes a similar stance against ‘the Race Grievance Industry’ (RGI) ‘whose only product is victimhood … sole purpose is to profit from racial strife’ (1). Martinelli’s (2016) book suggests that Black people are shot because they do not follow police instructions, and the mainstream mantra is ‘All lives matter’. This aggressive ‘decent White folks’ response is more muted in the UK.

Britain has its own condemnatory narrative: the Conservative prime minister in 1993 gave the government’s view on crime as requiring that we should ‘condemn a little more and understand a little less’. After the 2011 riots, the prime minister allocated blame to ‘Irresponsibility. Selfishness. Behaving as if your choices have no consequences. Children without fathers. Schools without discipline. Reward without effort. Crime without punishment. Rights without responsibilities. Communities without control.’ Explicit reference to race was not made, but is a detectable subtext (Stratton 2011) and there is no analysis of services which might alleviate poverty or of government policies which actually generate inequality.

A more striking case of underlying racism is the murder of Stephen Lawrence, a Black teenager, in 1992. Within an hour of hearing their son had been attacked and was in hospital, Stephen’s parents drove by the scene of the stabbing in Well Hall Road in south London and there were no visible signs of a crime, no police presence, no taping off of the crime scene. Surveillance of the suspects was not carried out properly as the main team was active in another case, a Black man suspected of theft. ‘The Black thief took priority over White murderers’ (Lawrence 2006, 83). This botched police handling of the case led, in 1999, to the Macpherson report identifying ‘institutional racism’ in police and public services, and resulted in the 2000 Race Relations Amendment. Act requiring public authorities to promote racial equality. This was a known racist area where, as one journalist observed of the suspected White boys, despite the lack of many things in their lives, ‘one thing they did have was their Whiteness’ (Cathcart 1999, 25).

The report took two years to complete, with 350 pages making 70 proposals. It was largely well received, but the response of one commentator was to call it ‘misguided and unfair’ (Daily Telegraph 1999) and its partner paper trumpeting, ‘Sir William must have been intellectually hijacked by his “advisors” on the report (Tom Cook, former Deputy Chief Constable, Dr Richard Stone, the chairman of the Jewish Council for Racial Equality, and the Rt Revd Bishop Dr John Santamu) an elite band of politically correct necromancers who have seduced poor old Sir William, 72, into an orgy of ideological soundness’ (Simon 1999, 4). Only in 2012 were two White young men jailed for the murder. This was an epic, tellingly attenuated, British race issue.

For both countries, though to different degrees, neoliberalism and the sanctification of the individual over the social group, reward decontextualised personal merit, so that:

not only is racism no longer an acceptable explanation for persistent inequality; the racialised individual is now held personally responsible for the inability to shake it off, reducing racism to the hurt feelings evoked by circumstantial bad luck rather than the systematic injustice born of systems designed to ensure the maintenance of White supremacy despite formal commitments to diversity (Hund and Lentin 2014, 15/16).

Distinct differences between the USA’s and Britain’s race histories are clear, important and affect current dispositions at every level, political/cultural, organisational and individual. The large, long term, slave-heritage, Black minority of the USA is significantly different from Britain’s recent Black migrants from Africa, the West Indian arrivals for work 70 years ago and the growing Asian population.

Different countries, different racisms?

There are nation-specific historical legacies and nation-centric patterns of inequality. Alibhai-Brown (2015) writes of the British approach to colonialism (and races) as less triumphalist than other nations with more application of ‘smooth skills’ co-opting local subjects, but there is no disguising the emphatic supremacism entwined with it. Other personal analyses of racism in the UK give a sense of the ever-present experience of marginalisation (Barling 2015), again, more benign than that in the USA. Younge, a Black British journalist returning home, describes his annoyance going through passport control, his ‘Blackness’ emphasised ‘with insulting questions asked politely’ (Younge 1999, 276/7). Such ‘micro-aggressions’ contrast with the brutality dealt out routinely to Black Americans: ‘Cops rolling up like death squads and effectively executing people who posed no real threat.’ (Younge 2015). There is shock to an English person (the writer) at an American conference in a mainly Black ‘town hall’ discussion, hearing the call to ‘teach our young men how not to get shot by police’.

For inequalities related to race or class in the USA, Anyon (1997), Reich (2012), Rothstein (2017) and Watkins (2001) present an angry, radical commentary on gross educational inequalities with corrective effort, underpowered and misconstrued (Carter and Welner 2013). These writers focus on economic and legal systems, which, through the allocation of resources, the protection of some groups and the repression and rejection of others, create and maintain a social structure riven with injustices.

Whilst at a lower intensity in the UK, inequalities in life chances persist in similar areas – healthcare, housing, schooling and exclusions, employment and earnings, criminal justice and welfare (Cabinet Office 2017; Reay 2017). Gillborn’s use of ‘White supremacy’ in relation to educational attainment in England has currency still (Gillborn 2005). Despite public, political protestations, action taken is not sustained and the same inequities persist. The Grenfell Tower tragedy in London, where 72 mostly immigrant poor died in a fire in a tower block, clad externally in cheap flammable insulation, demonstrates for Shilliam, ‘the callous abandoning of Britain’s working poor by mendacious elites who have pursued marketisation over redistribution, gentrification over social security … contracting-out over public accountability’ (Shilliam 2018, 171). ‘Whiteness studies’ are foregrounding ‘White’ as an ethnicity with a penetration beyond the psychological and notions of individual and group prejudice to more directly ‘implicate the ruling class in the formation and maintenance of white supremacy’ (Preston 2009, 100).

Britain’s most extensive, long-lasting and brutal racisms happened long ago and far away, while America’s are recent, ongoing and close at hand. Both require policy and action to respond to racisms in their varied, modern forms. The British can talk of fewer police violence, no recent laws that have explicitly prevented people of colour from doing what White citizens do (marrying outside their race, living in certain areas, identifying laws which target them – except ‘sus’). Yet low pay, high imprisonment rates, poor representation at higher levels in professions or civic posts (medicine, judiciary, MPs) and low attainment levels of specific Black and mixed groups in education are serious indicators of a society neglecting the needs of these communities. The racialisation of all citizens needs to be recognised so that ‘White’ is seen to have attributes and histories with selective memory and biased justifications.

The impact of the Equality and Human Rights Commission with its call for Equality Impact Assessments (EHRC 2017) is limited and it reports year on year the same inequities, most recently under the title ‘Healing a divided Britain: the need for a comprehensive race equality strategy’ (EHRC 2016), a report with worthy aspirations but little policy or practice effect. The USA’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC 2019), the basis for which was established by President Kennedy in 1961, suffers from similar shortcomings with Jameel and Yerardi (2019) reporting many cases are unresolved and that race claims, which are the most commonly filed, have the lowest rate of success, are not professionally investigated with the result that it is ‘a system that routinely fails workers’.

Attention and effort must be applied over the medium term at three equally important levels:

• The constituents of Whiteness;

• Economics of racisms;

• The public education challenge.

The constituents of whiteness

School children and adults view the British Empire with admiration and sanitise or ‘forget’ parts of the national history which do not conform to the preferred image. The British Empire was fundamentally a business venture over centuries which took what it wanted by force from all over the world, but that is not the preferred image. The USA bills itself as the land welcoming ‘your poor … huddled masses … wretched refuse’ (Statue of Liberty inscription) ‘with God on our side’. Both are indisputably biased claims. Both countries continue exploitative trading relations, which have little regard for the well-being of peoples in countries which are economically less developed (Parsons 2020).

Whiteness brings with it a felt superiority, supported by selective historical memory and a denigration of other peoples, enabling that ‘erasure of Black suffering’ (Moore and Sullivan 2018) and a sense of righteous exclusion of other races, other accents, other religions, differently to the Americans but nonetheless putting people down and shutting them out.

Akala writes of British academics ‘explaining away, downplaying and essentially cheering for the mass-murdering White supremacist piracy of the British Empire’ (Akala 2018, 11), resonating with Gilroy’s ‘post-colonial melancholia’ and the absurdity of how, ‘Standing firm against Nazis comforts Brits by making them feel righteous and perennially innocent. Being forced to reckon with the ongoing consequences of imperial crimes makes them uncomfortable’ (Gilroy 2005).

Katznelson’s (2005) When Affirmative Action was White, sees White designed civil rights interventions in the USA as intended to do ‘just enough’. In the UK, Black underachievement projects were discontinued, the Child Poverty Commission was renamed the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, then dropping the ‘child poverty’ part altogether. It similarly rolled the Commission for Race Equality into the Equality and Human Rights Commission, dealing with every social justice issue. In both countries, action is largely rhetorical, monitoring superficial and funding restrained.

The economics of racisms

English history glorifies elites in their power and panache in building up an empire and is inextricably linked to the premium of Whiteness. Thompson’s epic The Making of the English Working Class (Thompson 1968) makes no mention of slavery or the slave trade, which is so important in Britain’s industrial development. Racism is expressed and enacted in different ways by different groups. There is a sense in which it is to ruling elites’ advantage to have immigrants as the object of blame so that attention is not turned to their control of finance, employment, availability of housing, welfare, and even the school curriculum by which their children will be judged. Where there is competition over scarce resources, it is between groups of have-nots and the ire is not directed at those who have excessive income and wealth and make decisions to limit resources ‘for the many’. Crozier (2016) warns, against competition between class and race positions, ‘hierarchies of oppression’ (ix) and the use of ‘model minorities as a stick with which to beat other Black and Minority Ethnic young people’ (x). It is unfortunate to see debate often focused at just that level.

Inequality is at the heart of racism, both in fuelling dissent – blame immigrants – and as an incentive for those in power to keep things as they are, rather than redistributing resources and certainly not acknowledging the wealth they have today as partly a consequence of past exploitative imperial activity. In discussions of racial discrimination, ‘there is a conspicuous absence of class and more importantly of a substantive criticism of capitalism’ (Miles and Brown 2003, 4). As Katz notes of America, applying equally to the UK, ‘large numbers of people throughout the nation’s history have been labelled as underserving [and] poverty has been viewed as a problem of persons … . personal deficiencies – moral, cultural, or biological’ (Katz 2013, xii). The notion of ‘structural violence’ sharpens the focus on the ‘unequal distribution of power [which] systematically disadvantages those who do not hold as much if any power at all [and] additional layers and multiple dimensions … then built upon this fundamental inequality’ (Ho, 2007, 4)

Neo-liberalism is the nature of the global capitalist environment in which there are benefits to excess labour and ‘edge’ groups living and believing in ‘meritocracy’ which legitimates the ‘ladder’ (Littler 2018, 3). As Bhattacharyya (2018) makes plain, neo-liberalism’s ills hit ethnic minorities hardest. Expressions of social justice and reports on inequality (Social Mobility Commission 2019) are ultimately a thin disguise for the unfettering of the national and international competitive capitalist enterprises. Anti-racist endeavours have to engage with this or be seen as similar earnest effort without the likelihood of change.

Bhopal warns that, in the UK, ‘within the neoliberal context, policy making reinforces White privilege [and] a structural shift in racial governance has taken place through the introduction of anti-terror legislation, the Prevent agenda and the teaching of ”British values”‘ (Bhopal 2018, 4), policy initiatives judged to protect capital but to the detriment of ethnic minorities.

The public education challenge

Respect is integral to an inclusive, just and sharing society. There should be a corrective narrative on a broad, public front, owning the guilt of past action, recognising the continuing global impact of neocolonialism practised by powerful (mostly White) nations and countering the ‘inferiorisation’ of people of colour. In both USA and UK schools, more is needed than an extension to the multicultural curriculum, which has had the character of token inclusion of people and artefacts from the ‘third world’ but operates still on the level of assimilation rather than diversity. Decolonising the curriculum sounds positive: as enacted in universities and teacher education, it can be an intellectual charade that does not play out to impact the experience of a wider population or children in schools. The schooling experience of all ethnicities is about relationships in a major way and those labelled ‘BAME’ and their families must ‘feel’ valued rather than ‘a liability or challenge’, as Pezzetti (2017, 136) found with preservice students who voiced abstract commitments to diversity. BAME teachers are under-represented in schools, where Wallace identifies ‘the diversity trap’ where Black staff are selected for ‘disciplinary, pastoral, and community-based roles … at the expense of their wide-ranging intellectual and professional talents’ (Wallace 2020, 346). The difficulties in moving forward are immense, with ‘White fragility’ identified as one element inhibiting White people’s engagement with race, seen as about other people’s race, not theirs (DiAngelo 2018).

Respect and trust are to be nurtured at the interpersonal level, but the most important transformation has to be in relation to redistribution of power and resources. Billings, in Deep Denial, writes of ‘the multi-generational process of racial entitlement and White privilege that gives White a sense of special place in the U.S.’ (Billings 2016, 235). Reay writes of education arrangements in the UK that ‘have never moved from being an elite system and inequality, in a culture of hyper-competitive individualism, reduces everyone’s sense of well-being’ (Reay 2017, 127).

Conclusion

In terms of White supremacy and racism, there are no metrics for computing different intensities while factoring in national histories, political and economic conditions, degrees of spatial separation, ethnic diversity and its volatility. Both countries need their own appraisals of how people of colour are rendered less worthy and less deserving by the historical inheritance of White hierarchical relationships and contemporary structures. The contemporary forces promoting racial inequalities, however seemingly passive, institutional or unconscious, have to be surfaced and addressed at the political and community levels. The personal experience of racism depends on income, housing and social class position, and, as Patel puts it, on ‘the tendency to racialize social events, especially by those who use it to reinforce views about the supposed problematic presence of Black and minority ethnic groups’ (Patel 2017, 129). These personal and local community racisms are identifiable and challengeable, even if not easily, but until there is some sense of unity across the class/ethnicity challenges, policy, politics and economics will continue to control lives and suppress groups – the usual groups. These will be told to blame each other and themselves.

Whilst educational content and opportunity changes will be helpful, and the public BLM protests, debates over statues and a re-evaluation of slavery, colonialism and imperialism are all positives, governments need ‘raise their game’ if the fate of commissions of enquiry and the official investigations are an indication of intention and impact; too often the publication of a report and recommendations is the final step, as though the job were done. The government must implement and monitor the progress of the implementation of measures to improve equality – in employment, education, criminal justice, health, etc. Much more than this is required to address inequalities based on wealth and income as equal participation and recognition is sabotaged by gross disadvantage experienced by families in terms of income, housing and education and healthcare. It is a wake-up call to label many existing policies and practices set out by governments in the UK and USA as ‘structural violence’, underpinning an individualistic, exclusive and repressive living environment. Governments dedicated to redistribution, funding of state services, provision of social housing and pursuing the goal of collective well-being may be the first requirements in this shift.

The maintenance of the hierarchy of worth, individualisation of responsibility, extreme disparity between elite wealth and deep poverty prompts uncharitable, often desperate, competition ‘at the bottom’, making respect, trust and sharing difficult and certainly not solvable by public exhortation or formal education. Neoliberal, globalised financial interests and individualising cultural pressures will rule. Until there is political action to address inequalities, crude fear, tension and blame will endure between groups to the benefit of elite interests. Public pedagogies which are permissive, wider and deeper and exploratory debate help to surface these issues. Impact and more equable outcomes at the school level will only follow appropriate funding of structures and processes and go beyond target setting and breast-beating. Attainment levels and school exclusions for some groups, most notably Black Caribbean students, are unremediated racist outcomes. If the existing system is ‘smokescreened’ and fundamentally underpinned by White power and exploitation, those in control will not relinquish this easily, but, optimistically, resistance at various levels is possible; and it is happening.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.