THREE MYTHS OF IMMIGRATION

I am giving the Milton K Wong Lecture in Vancouver in June. Entitled ‘What’s Wrong with Multiculturalism? A European Perspective’, it will try to explain to a Canadian audience, for whom multiculturalism has a very different meaning than it does to a European one, the contours of the European debate, as well as my disagreements with both sides. In particular I want to show why both multiculturalists and many of their critics (particularly their rightwing critics) buy into the same set of myths about the history of immigration into Europe, these three in particular:

THE SPECTRE OF LE PEN AND THE SHAME OF THE LEFT

The incumbent candidate falters badly. His main opponent fares barely any better. The candidates from so-called ‘fringe’ parties garner more votes than either of the mainstream ones. The far right gains its biggest success. The only thing striking about the first round of the French elections was that there was nothing striking about it.  It followed the pattern of almost every election across Europe over the past few years.

This Sunday Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande will slug it out in the second round.  Missing, however, will be the politician who delivered probably the most significant result in the first round will, and who arguably will wield the greatest influence upon the French politics in the months to come, whatever the result of the second round: the Front National’s Marine Le Pen.

CLR JAMES, FRANTZ FANON AND THE MEANING OF LIBERATION

1776. 1789. 1917. The American. The French. The Russian. The three great revolutions of the modern world. The three revolutions with which everyone is familiar, each one telling a different story about modernity. Yet, as I argued in my previous post, the fourth great revolution that helped define modernity  – the Haitian Revolution of 1791 -  is one that barely anyone remembers these days. It was the first true successful revolt in history. But more than that, the Haitian Revolution was the first time that the emancipatory logic of the Declaration of the Rights of Man was seen through to its revolutionary conclusion. For that alone, it should find its place in history.

That we do remember the Haitian Revolution at all is largely due to the great Caribbean writer, thinker and revolutionary CLR James whose magnificent masterpiece The Black Jacobins eloquently captured both its political substance and its poetical spirit. An extraordinary synthesis of novelistic narrative and factual reconstruction (James had originally conceived of it as fiction, then wrote a play that was performed in London, with Paul Robeson in the lead role, before publishing the book in 1938), The Black Jacobins is a book that helped transform both the writing of history and history itself.  ‘Men make their own history’, James wrote, ‘and the black Jacobins of San Domingo were to make history which would alter the fate of millions of men and shift the economic currents of three continents. But if they could seize opportunity, they could not create it.’ Three decades before historians such as Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm and EP Thompson began writing ‘history from below’, James told of how the slaves of Haiti had not simply been passive victims of their oppression but active agents in their own emancipation. In Toussaint L’Ouverture, the great leader of the revolution, he found a tragically flawed figure, whose story laid bare for James many of the paradoxes and ambiguities of liberation struggles in the modern world. And in telling the story both of the revolution and of its figurehead, James created a work that was to become indispensable to a new generation of Toussaint L’Ouvertures that, over the next three decades, helped lead the anti-colonial struggles in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.

HERE TO STAY, HERE TO FIGHT

BBC Radio 4 broadcast a documentary this week by Zaiba Malik on the history of the Asian Youth Movements. For many of us who grew up in 1970s and 1980s, the AYMs were a central feature of our lives. Radical and secular, the movements challenged both the vicious racism that defined Britain in that era and many traditional values too, helping to establish an alternative leadership in Asian communities that confronted the conservatives on issues such as the role of women and the dominance of the mosque.Today, in an age in which communities are defined in terms almost solely of faith and culture, when identity politics has ripped apart any sense of radical unity, and when the idea of a ‘secular Muslim’ seems to most people an oxymoron, a movement and a tradition that thirty years ago was highly influential is barely remembered. Zaiba Malik’s documentary was enjoyable, good on the struggle against  racism, less sure about the struggle within the communities.

I have written of the AYMs in my book From Fatwa to Jihad. Here is an extract that delves into the roots of the AYMs and how they came to be formed. I will publish a second extract later this week which will look at how the British state and religious conservatives within Asian communities joined forces to marginalise secular radicals. For more details about the AYM, the Tandana archive set up by Anandi Ramamurthy is a good place to start.

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On 17 April 1976 the far-right National Front organised a march through the centre of Manningham, the main Asian area in Bradford. It was to end with a rally at a local school. The National Front was in the late 1970s a minor force in British politics, but more than a bit unpleasant. In 1974 it took 44 per cent of the vote in a parliamentary by-election in Deptford in South London; three years later more than 120,000 voters supported it in London-wide elections. It was on the streets, however, rather that at the ballot box, that the NF preferred to strut its stuff. It had a cadre of thugs often involved in racial assaults and was fond of organising provocative marches through predominantly black and Asian areas. And it was on the streets that a new generation of blacks and Asians decided to take on the NF. This brought them into conflict not just with the fascists but often with their own community leaders, too.

THE LONESOME DEATH OF TRAYVON MARTIN

In 1963 Bob Dylan wrote ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’, the story of the murder of a 51-year-old barmaid by the wealthy young tobacco farmer William Devereux ‘Billy’ Zantzinger, who eventually received a six month sentence for the killing. That sentence was handed down on the same day that Martin Luther King delivered his I Have a Dream speech in Washington, at the end of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Dylan was one of the marchers. Returning home to New York, he sat in an all-night coffee shop on Seventh Avenue and wrote his song. Influenced, as Dylan observed in his autobiography, by Brecht and Weil, the song (which came out the following year in The Times They Are A Changin’ album) is an excoriating assault not just on racism, but on the collusion of the authorities, the law and liberal opinion:

In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel
To show that all’s equal and that the courts are on the level
And that the strings in the books ain’t pulled and persuaded
And that even the nobles get properly handled
Once that the cops have chased after and caught ‘em
And that ladder of law has no top and no bottom
Stared at the person who killed for no reason
Who just happened to be feelin’ that way without warnin’
And he spoke through his cloak, most deep and distinguished
And handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance
William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence.
Ah, but you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
Bury the rag deep in your face
For now’s the time for your tears.

WHY BOTH SIDES ARE WRONG IN THE RACE DEBATE

Is race a biological reality? Or is it a social construction? It is a debate that shows no sign of being resolved. The more that we know of the genetics of human differences, ironically, the more fractious the debate seems to get, and the more entrenched the various positions seem to be.

The latest issue of the magazine American Scientist contains a review by the biologist Jan Sapp of two books that insist that race has no biological validity. Sapp agrees. ‘The consensus among Western researchers today’, he suggests, ‘is that human races are sociocultural constructs’. Nevertheless ‘the concept of human race as an objective biological reality persists in science and in society. It is high time that policy makers, educators and those in the medical-industrial complex rid themselves of the misconception of race as type or as genetic population.’

The distinguished evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, who possesses impeccable liberal and anti-racist credentials, took umbrage at the review. ‘If that’s the consensus’, he snorted, then ‘I am an outlier’. Coyne insists that ‘human races exist in the sense that biologists apply the term to animals’. The equally distinguished biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks responded with what he himself described as a ‘rant’ against Coyne. ‘I have really had it with anti-intellectualism masquerading as biological science’, Marks fumed, claiming that Coyne  ’isn’t interested’ in what anthropologists have learnt about human population differences and comparing Coyne’s view on race with that of Creationists on evolution.

Why are we still having these kinds of debates? Why has a deepening understanding of genetics, and of the human genome, not helped to answer the questions, even among those who insist that their views derive solely from the facts? 

THE BEST WAY OF DEALING WITH XENOPHOBIA

The New York Times asked me to contribute to a debate, on its online ‘Room for Debate’ pages, on the prospects for the far right in Europe in the wake of the Anders Breivik massacre. The original question was ‘Is Europe becoming more fertile ground for rightwing movements with anti-immigrant sentiments?’ In the end the Times ran the debate under the headline ‘Will the Norway Massacre Deflate Europe’s Right Wing’? My response is primarily to the first question, rather than to the second.

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Far right and populist parties have made major gains in many European countries. Such movements have certainly fed off a diet of racism, anti-Muslim prejudice and anti-immigrant sentiment. It would be simplistic, however, to explain the advance of populism and the far right simply as an expression of an aggressive new climate of racism and Islamophobia. It would be more simplistic still to suggest that such a climate would inevitably create a horror such as the Oslo massacre.

Far right parties throughout Europe draw upon two distinct constituencies. The first is a core of hardline racist bigots– many of these parties, such as the British National Party and the Sweden Democrats emerged out of the neo-fascist swamp and many still live there. The bigots have, however, been joined by a swathe of new supporters whose hostility towards immigrants, minorities and Muslims is shaped less by old-fashioned racism than by a newfangled sense of fear and insecurity. Many have traditionally supported social democratic parties but feel abandoned by organizations that have largely cut links with their working class constituencies.  Polls have shown that, even more than the rest of the population, such supporters appear dissatisfied with their lives, anxious about the future, and distrustful of any figure of authority.

NO CONTACT

The Prime Directive. As any self-respecting Trekkie knows, it is Star Trek‘s most important ethical rule. And possibly the most stupid.  ‘Thou shalt not interfere with the natural evolution of another culture by giving primitive peoples technology or knowledge beyond their years.’ Or as Starfleet Regulations put it:

As the right of each sentient species to live in accordance with its normal cultural evolution is considered sacred, no Star Fleet personnel may interfere with the normal and healthy development of alien life and culture. Such interference includes introducing superior knowledge, strength, or technology to a world whose society is incapable of handling such advantages wisely.

In the Star Trek universe, the Prime Directive has particular force in the case of ‘pre-warp’ civilizations – societies, that is, that have not yet developed warp drive and hence are incapable of interstellar travel. Such peoples are to be denied not only advanced technology but also any knowledge of extraplanetary civilizations or of the possibility of interplanetary travel. In the words of James T Kirk prior to a mission to a ‘primitive’ planet, which the Enterprise crew were about to visit by disguising themselves as locals,  ‘No identification of self or mission. No interference with the social development of said planet. No references to space, other worlds, or advanced civilizations.’

I was reminded of the Prime Directive on hearing of  the news that in Brazil a new Amazonian tribe has been discovered. Or rather, that it hasn’t been. 

THE SCIENCE OF SEEING WHAT YOU WANT TO SEE

Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man is one of the classic works of history of science. Gould, who died in 2002, was, as many probably know, not only an evolutionary biologist and influential popularizer of science, but also a vocal critic of racial theories. The Mismeasure of Man is a full-frontal assault on ideas of race and IQ that helped transform they way that many looked upon these issues. The importance of Gould’s work, as Marek Kohn put it in his book The Race Gallery is that ‘it examined both the historical context of race science, and the data too’.

A key part of Gould’s argument, which brought together the historical context and the data, and seemed to reveal how the one influenced the other, was his discussion of the work of nineteenth century racial scientist Samuel Morton, one of the most important scientific figures of his day. When Morton died in 1851, the New York Tribune said of him that ‘probably no scientific man in America enjoyed a higher reputation among scholars throughout the world than Dr Morton.’ His reputation was built on his home collection of more than a thousand human skulls scoured from every corner of the globe. ‘Nothing like it exists anywhere else’, enthused America’s leading naturalist of the time Louis Agassiz. Friends and enemies alike referred to Morton’s charnel house as the ‘American Golgotha’.