Ali Rattansi > Quotes

“This ‘mantra’ of race, class, and gender has now led to a new and to some extent almost separate field of research under the umbrella term of ‘intersectionality’ studies, which includes within its research framework an understanding that age, disability, and citizenship also have differential impacts on majority and minority communities and individuals.”
― Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction

“To put it somewhat differently, but making the same point, should we distinguish between ethnocentrism and racism?”
― Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction

“In the light of the history sketched out above, it should be clear, counterintuitive though it may seem, that ‘whiteness’ (and ‘blackness’) is as much achieved as ascribed.”
― Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction

“The idea that Jews were a distinct race was given currency by Nazi racial science. But before that, there was little consensus that Jews were a distinct race.”
― Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction

“The ‘Orient’, in this set of processes, was homogenized, and its ‘essence’ regarded as immutable. The widely influential ‘Clash of Civilizations’ thesis advanced by the American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington in 1997 is testament to the enduring frame of the forever-continuing ‘West versus Islam’ (and other cultures) idea that Said had highlighted”
― Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction

“Colourblind racism asserts that there are no real problems with racism in our society, that challenges stem from individuals rather than our institutions and collective thinking and behavior.”
― Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction

“This is the paradox of being white and ‘seeing white’, but being to all intents and purposes ‘invisible’ or, more appropriately, as Frankenberg, Garner, and other sociologists of ‘whiteness’ have suggested, ‘unmarked’. In Western societies whites take being white for granted. Their particularity tends to be universalized. It is the default position from which the world is seen, but it also allows them to ‘disappear’ from the foreground of spaces and places, from their own streets to parks and shopping malls.”
― Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction

“In France it is Muslims, of North and West African origin, whose members are generally regarded as part of minorités visibles, or visible minorities, who are said to be the perpetrators of the new antisemitism.”
― Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction

“In both Europe and the USA, racialization is fed by a backlash against ‘multiculturalism’ in which the positions of the extreme and the mainstream right often overlap to a considerable extent, assisted by a common over-reaction over issues of refugees and asylum seekers.”
― Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction

“In essence, in the UK and to some degree in the USA, this is said to be the ‘new antisemitism’: criticisms of the state of Israel that do not discriminate sufficiently between Israel and Jewish people whether in Israel or outside Israel.”
― Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction

“But crucially, the difficulties surrounding racial classification also meant that definitions of black and white remained indeterminate.”
― Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction

“As we will see, the ‘whiteness’ of Jews, especially in the USA, as of Italians and the Irish too, has actually been gradually achieved in the 20th century as part of a social and political process of inclusion. As ‘semites’, but also as ‘orientals’, Jews were often regarded as not belonging to white races, while it was not uncommon in the 19th century for the English and Americans to regard the Irish as ‘black’ and for Italians to have an ambiguous status between white and black in the USA.”
― Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction

“Whiteness (and blackness) have been historically created, and it is necessary to understand some key insights into the formation of ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’,”
― Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction

“criticisms of the actions of the state of Israel and antisemitism are conflated in many statements and in actions taken against the state of Israel.”
― Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction

“no matter whether the individual motivations and behaviour of ordinary white people were racist or not, all whites benefited from social structures and organizational patterns that continually disadvantaged blacks, while allowing whites to stay well ahead in living standards, including housing, health and life span, neighbourhood amenities and safety, educational facilities and achievement, level of employment, and income and wealth.”
― Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction

“The fact that much grooming is carried out by white men is never mentioned, making it possible to argue that it is something about their religion that makes these Asian men prone to such behaviour.”
― Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction

“The draftees of the working definition acknowledged its somewhat loose and vague wording, and thus added a number of ‘examples’ ‘which may serve as illustrations’.”
― Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction

“practically each racial scientist came up with a bewildering classification of human races. For instance, in 1933 von Eickstedt had come up with a scheme which included three main races, eighteen sub-races, three ‘collateral’ races, and three ‘intermediate’ types.”
― Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction

“processes of racialization have been crucially intertwined with the rise of neoliberal economic policies that involve the deregulation of markets and the shrinking of the state sector, especially in the area of welfare. In effect, neoliberal policies have served to reproduce white privilege.”
― Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction

“the collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness, and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.”
― Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction

“there was only a 15 per cent genetic variation across ‘racially’ and geographically classified populations.”
― Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction

“The effect of this statement has to be understood in the context of the times. This was a period when, whatever the misgivings about Nazism as a political project, there was widespread popular and academic acceptance of a scientific foundation for the division of humankind into separate races with different, stable, biologically inherited characteristics. While the UNESCO announcement may have come as a bolt from the blue for large numbers of people, the scientific grounding for this challenge had in fact been in preparation for some time before the Holocaust. The interwar period had been characterized by a growing scepticism towards scientific racism. In the USA it came primarily from the newly expanding field of cultural anthropology. In the UK the critique emerged largely from biology and other natural sciences.”
― Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction

“It is often argued that the British left is the main perpetrator of this form of antisemitism.”
― Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction

“The ‘racial types’ they posited are of relatively recent origin, having been replaced over and over by other types of populations in previous centuries.”
― Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction

“This combines with the constant refrain from many in Europe and the USA that Muslims are intrinsically culturally inassimilable, thus essentializing and naturalizing Islam and Muslims.”
― Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction

“First, the idea of ‘race’ contains both biological and cultural elements, for example skin colour, religion, and behaviour. Second, the biological and cultural appear to combine in variable proportions in any definition of a racial group, depending upon the group and the historical period in question. And racial status, as in the ‘whitening’ of Jews, the Irish, and others, is subject to political negotiation and transformation.”
― Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction

“Ignored are the secular regimes and processes that have historically been evident in many Muslim-majority countries such as Egypt, Turkey, Morocco, and Tunisia, as well as the secularism evident in second- and third-generation migrants from these countries.”
― Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction

“There is little doubt that had de Menezes been blond and blue-eyed, he would not even have entered the police’s surveillance radar.”
― Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction

“This formulation is regarded by the IHRA as a ‘non-legally binding’ working definition.”
― Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction

“This is the paradox of being white and ‘seeing white’, but being to all intents and purposes ‘invisible’ or, more appropriately, as Frankenberg, Garner, and other sociologists of ‘whiteness’ have suggested, ‘unmarked’. In Western societies”
― Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction