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The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st Century Britain
Is Britain becoming a more racist society? Leading media commentator Arun Kundnani looks behind media hysteria to show how multicultural Britain is under attack by government policies and vitriolic press campaigns that play upon fear and encourage racism. Exacerbated by the attacks of 9/11 and 7/7, Kundnani argues that a new form of racism is emerging, one that is based on a systemic failure to understand the causes of forced migration, global terrorism, and social segregation. The result is a climate of hatred, especially against Muslims and asylum seekers. Communities are more divided than ever. Yet the government presses ahead with flawed policies and antiterrorist legislation that creates further resentment. Behind it all lies a refusal to grasp the ways in which the world has been changed by globalization. What can be done? This timely and precise analysis is a useful account of why racism is now thriving and what can be done to stop it. It will be of interest to anyone who is appalled by the current state of race relations in Britain and it should be required readding for all policy makers
232 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2007
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About the author
Arun Kundnani
11 books42 followersKundnani writes about racial capitalism and Islamophobia, surveillance and political violence, and Black radical movements. He is the author of The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, extremism, and the domestic War on Terror (Verso, 2014) and The End of Tolerance: racism in 21st century Britain (Pluto, 2007), which was selected as a New Statesman book of the year. He has written for the Nation, the Guardian, the Washington Post, Vice, and The Intercept. Born in London, he moved to New York in 2010. A former editor of the journal Race & Class, he was miseducated at Cambridge University, and holds a PhD from London Metropolitan University. He has been an Open Society fellow and a scholar-in-residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University.
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September 18, 2011
Kundnani's principal thesis is that racism continues in modern-day Britain, though its medium of operation is mainly the institutional discrimination rooted in the practices of the state. Individual prejudice, though still real, plays a secondary role in generating disadvantage for people of colour.
To support this contention he draws on the record of immigration control, which from his perspective has become the means to hold down subaltern ethnicities in the way in which colonialism once did. The political mainstream in most liberal democratic societies is no longer prepared to give house-room to the idea that black people are inherently inferior, and that rule by the imperial nations is a humanitarian kindness to help offset their backwardness and incapcity for self-direction. The stage it has now moved into is one which says that the higher levels of market sophistication which exist in the global North are a product of the hard work and merit of its citizens, and the peoples of the global South quite simply have to take responsibility for their own backwardness and try and get with the programme.
Kundnani challenges ideas like this by insisting on the role of globalisation as a force which continues to hold the under-developed countries in the grasping embrace of their old colonial masters, giving few options for the rate of industrialisation which will generate wealth and welfare on the scale of the dominant countries.
Immigration controls play the role of managing the consequences of global wealth disparities. The labour rich/capital poor countries of the South are obliged to export their surplus populations in a tactic designed to both relieve excessive competition for scarce jobs at home, but also to generate an income in the form of remittances, which play a more important role in the promotion of economic development in many countries than development aid.
Much of the book recounts the history of immigration controls in the UK since WWII, showing how in its different phases the UK economy depended on labour supplies from the Caribbean, and other parts of the Commonwealth. In more recent times the restructuring of external economic realtions has shifted the areas of supply to the countries of the EU; but the principle remains that people born in poor regions are required by the logic of global markets to up sticks and to move to the places where there are better chances of jobs - even low paying ones - being on offer.
Part of the historical account acknowledges the fact that an ethical order was introduced by the liberal capitalist countries after the way, partly out of recognition of the fact -demonstrated by the rise of fascism in the 1930s - that their system was capable of horrible levels of savagery. The International Declaration on Human Rights, and the Geneva Convention on Refugees, were typical of the types of instruments which came into force in the late 40s and 50s to check the worst excesses of state poower over citizens.
But Kundnani argues that these measures are now regarded as being dated by the dominant nations. The preference since 1989 has been for 'muscular liberalism' to play the role of international defender of basic human rights with the type of actions which to many - in Afghanistan and Iraq - simply look too much like a new phase of imperialism. But never mind that: for the Bushes, Blairs, Obamas, Sarkozys and Camerons, the vigour of foreign interventinsim is a good enough reason to toll back the rights of asylum seekers and refugees.
The analysis is carried across to look at the phenomenon of economic migration, which has been on the rise across all the developed countries for the last two decades. Global capitalism needs to befed by global labour markets and, after a hiatus lasting since the oil-crisis provoked immigration stop of the 1970s, the demand for migrant workers across large swathes of the economoy is once again up. But this time, with a state operating IT-boosted levels of surveillance and monitoring, borders have left the fringes of nations to become digital, projected across the global in an all but invisible skein of biometical triggered boundaries which are intended to keep the unskilled from rising into the ranks of the skilled, and the skilled standing in line for the points-based visas they need to pursue their careers.
The new immigration controls extend across wider areas of social policy, to take in the doling out of welfare and the modelling of 'social cohesion' into their maw. As market failure provikes urban unrest the responsibility for outburst of anger and frustration is displaced into 'common values' which 'we' are supposed to ahve in abundance, and the migrants lack almost entirely. Except this time its not just the migrants themselves who pose the problems with their strange village ways and poor English, but their kids - British-born but nevertheless detached from the values which are supposed to be typical of the British people - including the large number who remain sinisterly Muslim in their outlooks and ideals.
Kundnani develops many themes as he follows through the logic of his argument. One of the most important is his assessment of the role played by multiculturalism in the management of relations between ethnic groups. He clearly shares many of the criticisms of his opponents on the right on this subject, agreeing that it has often led to the nurturing of fairly corrupt self-appointed elites to bring about the levels of collaboration whch the British state has required from itsimmigrant communities. But nevertheless there is the germ of an idea in multiculturalism which must be returned to, only this time to aid in the forging of solidarity across the ethnic divisions in working class communities, rather than their conformity with the diktats of the local British elites.
Finding a way back to a radical practice of multicltural solidarity is the urgent task which this book sets out before us. On that he is 100 per cent correct.
To support this contention he draws on the record of immigration control, which from his perspective has become the means to hold down subaltern ethnicities in the way in which colonialism once did. The political mainstream in most liberal democratic societies is no longer prepared to give house-room to the idea that black people are inherently inferior, and that rule by the imperial nations is a humanitarian kindness to help offset their backwardness and incapcity for self-direction. The stage it has now moved into is one which says that the higher levels of market sophistication which exist in the global North are a product of the hard work and merit of its citizens, and the peoples of the global South quite simply have to take responsibility for their own backwardness and try and get with the programme.
Kundnani challenges ideas like this by insisting on the role of globalisation as a force which continues to hold the under-developed countries in the grasping embrace of their old colonial masters, giving few options for the rate of industrialisation which will generate wealth and welfare on the scale of the dominant countries.
Immigration controls play the role of managing the consequences of global wealth disparities. The labour rich/capital poor countries of the South are obliged to export their surplus populations in a tactic designed to both relieve excessive competition for scarce jobs at home, but also to generate an income in the form of remittances, which play a more important role in the promotion of economic development in many countries than development aid.
Much of the book recounts the history of immigration controls in the UK since WWII, showing how in its different phases the UK economy depended on labour supplies from the Caribbean, and other parts of the Commonwealth. In more recent times the restructuring of external economic realtions has shifted the areas of supply to the countries of the EU; but the principle remains that people born in poor regions are required by the logic of global markets to up sticks and to move to the places where there are better chances of jobs - even low paying ones - being on offer.
Part of the historical account acknowledges the fact that an ethical order was introduced by the liberal capitalist countries after the way, partly out of recognition of the fact -demonstrated by the rise of fascism in the 1930s - that their system was capable of horrible levels of savagery. The International Declaration on Human Rights, and the Geneva Convention on Refugees, were typical of the types of instruments which came into force in the late 40s and 50s to check the worst excesses of state poower over citizens.
But Kundnani argues that these measures are now regarded as being dated by the dominant nations. The preference since 1989 has been for 'muscular liberalism' to play the role of international defender of basic human rights with the type of actions which to many - in Afghanistan and Iraq - simply look too much like a new phase of imperialism. But never mind that: for the Bushes, Blairs, Obamas, Sarkozys and Camerons, the vigour of foreign interventinsim is a good enough reason to toll back the rights of asylum seekers and refugees.
The analysis is carried across to look at the phenomenon of economic migration, which has been on the rise across all the developed countries for the last two decades. Global capitalism needs to befed by global labour markets and, after a hiatus lasting since the oil-crisis provoked immigration stop of the 1970s, the demand for migrant workers across large swathes of the economoy is once again up. But this time, with a state operating IT-boosted levels of surveillance and monitoring, borders have left the fringes of nations to become digital, projected across the global in an all but invisible skein of biometical triggered boundaries which are intended to keep the unskilled from rising into the ranks of the skilled, and the skilled standing in line for the points-based visas they need to pursue their careers.
The new immigration controls extend across wider areas of social policy, to take in the doling out of welfare and the modelling of 'social cohesion' into their maw. As market failure provikes urban unrest the responsibility for outburst of anger and frustration is displaced into 'common values' which 'we' are supposed to ahve in abundance, and the migrants lack almost entirely. Except this time its not just the migrants themselves who pose the problems with their strange village ways and poor English, but their kids - British-born but nevertheless detached from the values which are supposed to be typical of the British people - including the large number who remain sinisterly Muslim in their outlooks and ideals.
Kundnani develops many themes as he follows through the logic of his argument. One of the most important is his assessment of the role played by multiculturalism in the management of relations between ethnic groups. He clearly shares many of the criticisms of his opponents on the right on this subject, agreeing that it has often led to the nurturing of fairly corrupt self-appointed elites to bring about the levels of collaboration whch the British state has required from itsimmigrant communities. But nevertheless there is the germ of an idea in multiculturalism which must be returned to, only this time to aid in the forging of solidarity across the ethnic divisions in working class communities, rather than their conformity with the diktats of the local British elites.
Finding a way back to a radical practice of multicltural solidarity is the urgent task which this book sets out before us. On that he is 100 per cent correct.
April 16, 2012
One of the best books written about the state of Britain in the 21st century. I think Kundnani is one of the most important new thinkers on the issue of integration, identity, cohesion, racism and the war on terror. Its definitely a must read.
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