The Guardian’s correspondent Gary Younge gave this talk on “Islamophobia: The new racism” at a Media Workers Against the War public meeting in London on January 22.
I try to come back to Britain every few months. The last time I came was in October — I looked at the newspapers in Heathrow and thought I’d arrived back in the 1970s. It was just after Jack Straw had “expressed his concern” about the niqab. Not satisfied with bombing foreign countries and detaining people without due process, we were now going to tell people what to wear.
I was particularly struck by a quote I read a vox-pop in the Guardian. A 16-year-old student was asked what he thought about the niqab. He said: “I’ll go further than Jack Straw and say they need to take off their veils. You need to see people face to face. It’s weird not knowing who it is you’re passing in the street, especially late at night when someone might jump you.”
When I had left a few months earlier this whole project was about saving muslim women, “saving them from terrible muslim men making them walk behind them and wear the veil” and so on. But now the problem was Muslim women were going to jump out in their niqabs and mug you! This 16-year old’s life was endangered, apparently, by these niqab-wearing Muslim women.
Which is only slightly less bizarre than the case in Holland where, in the middle of the election campaign, the right-wing party that won the election suggested changing the constitution so that women would not be able to wear burkas. Now there are about 15 and 30 women in Holland who wear burkas. They could have sent them a letter individually!
You do not change your constitution because of what 15 or 30 women wear. If we’re going to do that then I would like all white men of a certain age to grow their hair, because every time I see a white guy with very short hair I get worried.
Jade Goody in a uniform
This time when I arrived in London it was strange. There was no longer this frenzy about the niqab and this weird consensus about who was the problem. But everybody was talking about racism. I arrived on the Saturday Jade Goody had been kicked out of the Big Brother house, Gordon Brown had waded in saying we’re a decent, tolerant group of people.
One of amazing things — I find this in the States as well — is the loss of innocence about racism: the powerful always seem to be able to find their innocence again in time for the next atrocious thing. So it was like the McPherson report had never happened. We were talking about racism as if it were something new.
And in all of this Jade Goody was perfect for this: she was a working class woman, uncouth, rude, ignorant, all the things that you can say about working class people. But nobody was going to talk about power, nobody was going to talk about systems.
And the truth is that Jade Goody in the BB house is not really the issue. But you put Jade Goody in uniform and you put her in immigration or in a police uniform and you give her the power to arrest, detain, shoot and kill — and that’s what we do, we send our Jade Goodies abroad to Iraq. (That’s not all the people in the army, but that’s certainly some of them if you look at the cases that have come up.) If you put them in a council then they can deny housing and healthcare and schools. So the real issue when we talk about Islamophobia and racism is power.
Ian Blair — get over it! Shake somebody else’s hand, it’s not a big deal. So often with these things these minor cultural things become these huge incidents because there’s nothing bigger to talk about. They’re not going to talk about power, about who has it and why and what we can do about it. And so it descends into this vicious, vile pettiness. It comes to something when you’re flying back to Bush’s America thinking: “Phew! That place is crazy!”
Racism of colour and creed
So instead the government and the establishment try to frame this discussion in terms of “essential British values”, as if there is something particular about Britain that somehow these people aren’t ready for. That there is an essential Britishness, somewhere in the ether there is an abstract, mythological Great British decency.
When it comes to race is, we’re coming down to the lowest common denominator, we’re getting worse and worse. Our racial discourse is degrading terribly rapidly.
Compared to what I read about Britain, when I do come back and I walk down Brick Lane and I see people with pierced belly buttons and in niqabs and black guys tap dancing and all the rest of it I’m thinking: where is this crisis? I’m expecting to see something terrible around every corner. You get this sense that Britain is on a precipice. In America they have a programme on CNN called something like “The Home Of Terror”, and it zooms in on the Houses of Parliament and Britain is now the nexus of international terrorism — if you believe CNN.
But the truth is that as far as I am aware it always has been that the crucial issue with Britain when it comes to things like integration is racism — it’s not Muslims, it’s not Islamophobia, it’s racism.
It’s peculiar: do you remember Ruth Kelly: “We want to have an honest and open discussion”? Whenever they want and honest and open discussion they want to talk shit about black people.
Nobody’s going to have an honest and open discussion about white people. So even though white people have most of the power and even though they are the people who start the wars and so on, that discussion is off the table.
And the truth is, all the great things we do have in this country — and I do still think that this is a brilliant country — are not there because of some innate sense of decency but because we fought for them. Notting Hill Carnival is a superb example — you cannot be a Tory leader now if you don’t go to Notting Hill Carnival. When they sold this country for the Olympics they said we’re a multiracial country, full of diversity and so on.
On the football terraces, in the cinemas, in theatres, on the streets of Brixton and Toxteth and Hownlsow and Bradford and Grunwick, and also on the streets of Nairobi and so on, we make that happen, black and white people fighting together. That’s what makes Britain the place that it is.
It didn’t come because people quite liked the idea: “Oh go on then, give us a chipati!” That’s not how antiracism happens, that’s not how the best of this country has happened. It’s happened because people have fought for it, both black and white.
But the manners and mannerisms of racism have changed. And in terms of the new racism it’s one of the things I want to concentrate on. It’s shifted. From race to religion, from colour to creed.
When I was growing up people used to say to Carribbeans: why can’t you be more like the Asians? They don’t want to sleep with our daughters, they don’t play their music loud, they don’t want to mix with us, they keep themselves to themselves, they work all hours — all these stereotypes would come out. And now 20 years on they are turning to the Asians and saying: why won’t you integrate with us? what’s wrong with our daughters? Why won’t you marry them? The whole parameters of racism have shifted and the way we have to fight it also.
I find it strange this squeamishness among some on the left about the involvement of religion in our politics. The Civil Rights Movement was run largely from the church. Now there were issues with that. But nobody called the 1963 march on Washington, where King made his “I have a dream” speech, no one called that the “march for Baptism”. People defend themselves where they are attacked, and if you’re attacked in your mosque, because of your religion, you will probably organise on a religious basis. That doesn’t mean that I have to be religious, that I have to refuse to shake people’s hands, but it means it is possible to create a coalition with people who are religious.
The whole emphasis has been not on racism, but on integration. “You people won’t integrate.” There are two things I find particularly weird about this. One of the people, Ruth Kelly, who has pursued this attack on fundamentalism is a member of Opus Dei. Is there no irony in this country?
Secondly, fundamentalism is a problem. I find religious fundamentalism a big problem. But the biggest problem I have with religious fundamentalism is the fundamentalism that is armed to the teeth and lives in the White House. Religious fundamentalism is not the preserve of Muslims and Islam.
Integration: it’s a weird issue. You want to ask integrate into what, and how, and who are you asking to integrate? Because the main people in Britain who have trouble integrating are white people. I don’t say that as a rhetorical device — it’s actually true. You don’t hear of black flight, or brown flight, or Asians or black people saying, oh dear, a white family’s moved in, I’m out of here. A Mori poll for Prospect last year found that 41% of whites compare to 26% of minorities wanted the races to live separately.
It’s also not true that the existence of non-white people causes racism, The most racist area of Britain is Devon and Cornwall according to a survey for the Observer in 2005, because it’s the absence of black people that allows these racist ideas to flourish.
So we have to be very clear. The biggest barrier to integration in this country is not the niqab, not the hejab, not the veil, it’s not language — it’s racism. I’m not saying that other things might not be issues at other time, although most of them frankly aren’t. But racism is the primary source.
So what are we going to do about it?
There are three things. First, we have to keep this in context. There is so little context provided for these things. I’ll give you and example. After the July 7 when they talked about home-grown terrorists, how can this be? The truth is Britain has been growing terrorists for years. We have an evening dedicated to a home-grown terrorist — it’s called Guy Fawkes night. So long as Britain has been going abroad and invading foreign countries there has been an element in Britain that has fought back on these shores in ways that are symmetrical, or parallel, to what is going on in those countries.
Second, and very important, we have to recognise the legitimate grievances of the white working class. Because that creates a pool of resentment. Often they do get left out because no one is talking about them. And some of the few people who are talking to them are the BNP. And they have a fundamentalism of their own — it’s called racial fundamentalism. White workers can look around them and see the problems that the have and they retreat into race and they attack the very people that they should be making common cause with to fight for the resources that they all need.
Finally, we have to stop this war. As long as this war is gong on — and every piece of intelligence supports this — there will be an increase in the kind of fundamentalism that makes all of our lives less secure.
In the USA there is a mood shift taking place. Over the past week or so the Democrats have wanted to do very little more than say please don’t do that [when Bush announced his troop "surge"]. The pressure has come from below from anti-war activists to force the Democrats to reassess what they need to do if they want to be re-elected.
Politics is about imagining other possibilities, and that is what we have to do right now. I was always under the impression that journalism was about talking truth to power, and not telling lies about the powers. And that is what an awful lot of British journalism has become.
