‘Does anybody really care what a racist says?’ Anti-racism in ‘post-racial’ times

Abstract

In September 2016 a new five-pound note entered circulation. In an online article, I offered a counter-hegemonic reading of Winston Churchill’s life in order to critique his depiction on the note. The article sparked a wave of online criticism. Drawing upon comments on the piece I wrote, in this article I show how, in the face of the threat posed by anti-racist counter-narratives, states of white amnesia lead commenters to draw upon alternative explanatory discourses that are consistent with ‘post-racial’ white supremacy. Particularly, I focus on those comments that pathologise me as the author of the article. These comments construct me as ‘a racist’, as ‘confused’ and as ‘lacking intelligence’. In each case, this framing allows the commenters to reconcile the cognitive dissonance that counter-hegemonic anti-racist work threatens to produce.

Keywords

anti-racism mixed-race ‘post-racial’white amnesia white supremacy

Introduction

On the 13 September 2016 a new five-pound note entered circulation. As an apparent celebration of Britishness, the polymer notes depicted the twice Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Commissioned by The Independent, I wrote an online article criticising this choice: ‘We can do better than the racist, repugnant, chemical weapon-supporting Churchill on our £5 notes’, the article was titled (Joseph-Salisbury, 2016). Whilst certainly more provocative than the one I had proposed, I cannot say the title does not reflect the article’s content, or my views.

In the article I draw attention to the fundamental role that Churchill played in the Indian genocide, or Bengal Famine, of 1943. I also note that he hoped for a civil war in India, was in favour of chemical weapon use, and ‘oversaw the use of concentration camps, mutilation, rape and castration’ (Joseph-Salisbury, 2016, n.p.). I noted that as well as advocating brutal violence in Greece and Afghanistan, Churchill called for the forcible sterilisation of 100,000 Britons, and sloganised ‘Keep Britain White’. Each of these assertions has been documented by historians (Knight, 2012; Raico, 1999) and are widely noted in online sources (Biswas, 2010; Hari, 2010). After making these points, I suggest that Olaudah Equiano would make a more meritorious choice. Finally, I argue that given the proliferation of post-Brexit racism (Burnett, 2017), Churchill is a choice that accurately reflects the state of contemporary Britain.

Despite some positive reaction, the article sparked an outpouring of heavy criticism in the comments section and on social media. Not only was the article criticised for its sentiment, but The Independent as the publishing newspaper, and myself as the author, were subject to a plethora of criticism and abuse. Alongside the negative comments, came messages of concern, support and solidarity from friends and colleagues. Many of these messages commended my ‘bravery’ in writing the piece. What the criticism, abuse and commendation shared was a sense that the article was controversial and disruptive of white hegemony. As one tweeter put it, ‘Remi Joseph-Salisbury sets out to provoke and he does.’ But why was an article, based on historically verifiable facts, thought to be so provocative? Whilst the ferocity of the backlash certainly took me by surprise, it should not have. If we understand the ‘post-racial’ conditions that define our times, the response should have been entirely predictable.

In this article I first consider the role and significance of white supremacy, how the ‘post-racial’ impacts upon white supremacy, and why white historical amnesia is so important to its maintenance. I consider specifically why the memory of Churchill is so important to the maintenance of ‘post-racial’ white supremacy, and why it makes such an illustrative case study. After outlining the methodology, I consider how commenters resist the threat that counter-hegemonic argumentation can pose. As commenters draw upon alternative explanations, they maintain the conditions of, and locate the article within, ‘post-racial’ white supremacy.

White supremacy, the ‘post-racial’ and white amnesia

White supremacy describes a system of structural white domination that is built upon racism (Gillborn, 2005). In order to endure amidst the destabilising threats posed by anti-racism, white supremacy is in a perpetual process of reformulation (Gillborn, 2018). As Derrick Bell (1992, p. 3) puts it, every apparent step towards racial progress sees the regeneration of white supremacy in a ‘particularly perverse form’. Contemporarily, one of the most powerful ways in which white supremacy endures is through its denial (Goldberg, 2015).

The ‘post-racial’ turn denotes the entry into an epoch in which race is thought to bear little sociopolitical significance (Goldberg, 2015). Particularly for whites, race is seen as a thing of the past, no longer operating as a determinant of life chances (Donnor & Brown, 2011). ‘How could have Obama’s election occurred if racial discrimination still exists?’, so the reasoning goes (Howard & Flennaugh, 2011, p. 105; Wise, 2009). Despite the illusion of the ‘post-racial’, as David Theo Goldberg (2015, p. 78) notes, ‘the enduring conditions made and marked by the racial continue to structure society. This is so regardless of the fact that its various explicit manifestations may now be rejected, rendered implicit, silenced or denied.’ The ‘post-racial’, therefore, is the denial of the structural, the ‘burying alive’, as Goldberg (2015, p. 78) might put it, of the histories and conditions of race. Contemporarily then, we are in a state of ‘post-racial’ white supremacy. For ‘post-racial’ white supremacy to endure, however, the coalescence of what Barnor Hesse terms ‘white amnesia’ is necessary.

According to Hesse (1997), white amnesia is a phenomenon brought about through white supremacy, or what he terms white hegemony. Simultaneously, white amnesia is an integral component in the maintenance of white supremacy generally, and ‘post-racial’ white supremacy particularly. As Hesse (1997, p. 91) develops a conceptualisation of white amnesia, he draws upon Stuart Hall (1978, p. 26) who describes,

… the profound historical forgetfulness – what I want to call the loss of historical memory, a kind of historical amnesia, a decisive mental repression – which has overtaken the British people about race and Empire since the 1950s. Paradoxically, it seems to me, the native, home-grown variety of racism begins with this attempt to wipe out and efface every trace of the colonial and imperial past.

White amnesia then, is the denial of the histories of racism and white supremacy (Choudry, 2010). It is, in part, the erasure of the historical context that allows white supremacy to endure, as strongly as ever. In this sense, white amnesia is much akin to what Paul Gilroy (2004, p. 2) invokes through his concept of ‘postcolonial melancholia’, a phenomenon that is ‘misleading and dangerous because it feeds the illusion that Britain has been or can be disconnected from its imperial past’. White amnesia, or postcolonial melancholia, means that ‘conflicts against Hitler and Hitlerism remain imaginatively close while Britain’s many wars of decolonisation – particularly in Africa, Malaya, Cyprus and Aden – are to be actively forgotten’ (Gilroy, 2005, n.p.). Thus, contemporary white supremacy is difficult to identify (and therefore endures), in part due to this collective ignorance and unwillingness to grapple with the ways in which history shapes the present (Mills, 1997).

Taking root in the particular context of postwar and postcolonial Britain, white amnesia occludes the possibility of seeing the links between Britain as Empire and Britain as Nation (Hall, 1978; Hesse, 1997). The erasure of these links feeds a hegemonic belief that race is ‘nothing intrinsically to do with the condition of Britain’ (Hall, 1978, p. 26), and obscures Britain’s central role in the construction and maintenance of race. As this dislocation takes root, ‘Britishness becomes valorised as whiteness’ (Hesse, 1997, p. 91). What emerges, then, is a mythological (white) British nativism that ascribes the problem of race to the particular racialised Other. Under white amnesiac readings of history, this Other comes into contact with Britain only at the point of postwar Commonwealth migration (Tyler, 2012).

By highlighting the ways in which the history of Empire continues to shape the present (Gilroy, 2004; Goldberg, 2015; Hesse, 1997), a critical counter-hegemonic reading of history poses a threat to white amnesiac discourse. Such a reading might lead to a re-evaluation of the present, particularly of Britishness and race, and to a shattering of the ‘post-racial’ illusion. (Here we begin to see my motivation/intention in writing the article!) White amnesia is important to the maintenance of ‘post-racial’ white supremacy because a nuanced and critical understanding of history threatens to reveal the ways in which the racial continues to shape society (Gilroy, 2004). It is only through histories that erase, deny and reinvent the past that the ‘post-racial’ myth of ‘harmony and pluralism’ becomes conceivable (Gilroy, 2004, 2005; hooks, 1992/1997). Put another way, the ‘post-racial’ is predicated, first, on the dilution of the true history of race and Empire (white amnesia), and then a mythological belief that society has overcome that (diluted) history. If we recognise that white amnesia is the erasure of racism’s past, and the ‘post-racial’ brings about the denial of racism’s present, we can see how these discourses coalesce to completely erase racism.

It is perhaps as a consequence of white amnesia that a 2016 YouGov poll was able to find that 44% of Brits were proud of Britain’s history of colonialism, a further 23% seemingly ambivalent, and only 21% deeming it regrettable. In the same poll 43% of respondents felt the British Empire was a good thing, 25% felt it was neither good or bad, and only 19% felt that it was bad (Dahlgreen, 2016). So why does the reaction to an article about Churchill make such a compelling focus?

By popular vote, Churchill is regarded as the ‘Greatest Briton of all time’ (BBC News, 2002). This is despite, as my online article demonstrated, Churchill having played an integral role in British colonialism: to a certain extent, he is the very embodiment of the history of ‘race and Empire’ (Hall, 1978, p. 26) that white amnesia occludes. Not only does he embody the race and Empire that is occluded, but he embodies the white amnesia (that, significantly, takes root during his terms as prime minister) that brings about that very occlusion. ‘History will be kind to me for I intend to write it’, said Churchill. Taken in its most literal sense, Churchill’s remarks hold truth: his writings have played a significant role in shaping understandings of history. If we read Churchill’s words more symbolically and take his ‘I’ to represent elite white men, his remark reads truer still. In a white supremacist, patriarchal, class-stratified society, it should come as no surprise that the histories that become hegemonic have been agreed upon by those in power: men like Churchill (Mills, 1997). This group has had access to and control over key social institutions like education (Apple, 1993) and the media: what Louis Althusser (1971) termed the ‘ideological state apparatus’. These institutions are integral to the maintenance of hegemonic white supremacy (Gillborn, 2006). It is these institutions that have helped to create a distorted historical reading of Churchill’s life; a collective white amnesia. It is the hegemony of this reading that precipitated such a vehement reaction to my article: the system of white supremacy is dependent upon white amnesiac historical revisionism, as well as the suppression of counter-narratives.

An article that is critical of Churchill threatens to disrupt white supremacist readings of history at the critical point from which white amnesiac histories emerge. White amnesiac histories begin with Britain’s (and Churchill’s) triumph over Nazism, whilst Churchill’s life is inextricably tied to the histories of race and Empire that are thought best forgotten. Thus, excavation of the latter makes Churchill a potentially contradictive figure that undermines ‘post-racial’ white supremacy, and as we will see, evokes a sense of cognitive dissonance for commenters/readers. As Fanon (1967, p. 194) explains,

Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief.

As I will show, the readers’ comments are indicative of ‘core beliefs’ that are shaped by ‘very strong’ white hegemony. Thus, the challenges to these beliefs are rejected in order to maintain the core belief (white amnesiac readings of history), and the wider conditions of ‘post-racial’ white supremacy.

Analysis of online comments

Focusing on the responses to the aforementioned online article (Joseph-Salisbury, 2016), the analysis here will subject a representative range of comments to critical scrutiny, situating them within the wider ‘post-racial’ conceits and tropes that allow such comments to obtain sense and traction.

Despite newspapers increasingly offering ways for readers to interact with and respond to content online (Richardson & Stanyer, 2011), there has been a relative lack of analysis of online content in the context of race and racism. Online comments have often been regarded as unrepresentative of public opinion and conducive to ‘polarized and extreme opinions’ (Milioni, Vadratsikas, & Papa, 2011, n.p.). However, with the shift from print to online media (Purcell, Rainie, Mitchell, Rosenstiel, & Olmstead, 2010) and concomitant changes in the ways that we communicate, there is a necessity for commensurate changes in methods of analyses (Bouvier, 2015). Given the sociocultural shifts to increasing use of online media, online comments can no longer be exempt from an analytical lens. Indeed, as Hall and O’Shea (2013) have shown, article comment sections are active in the making of hegemonic ideas.

As an analysis of online comments on The Guardian news site found, ‘often things are said to journalists and other readers that would be unimaginable face to face’ (Gardiner et al., 2016, n.p.). According to Faulkner and Bliuc (2016), this is possible through the moral disengagement that has engendered a proliferation of comment management among news sites (Pöyhtäri, 2014). Between 2006 and 2016, moderators on The Guardian removed 2% of all online comments due to a breach of ‘community standards’. Unsurprisingly this percentage was higher on articles written by women and people of colour (Gardiner et al., 2016). Amongst the blocked comments, ‘author abuse’ was common. Expressions of ‘xenophobia, racism, sexism and homophobia’, directed at the authors, and more generally, ‘were all seen regularly’ (Gardiner et al., 2016, n.p.).

As The Independent’s (2015) Community Guidelines make clear, the moderation of online comments means that personal attacks, hate speech, threats and comments containing bad or indecent language are subject to removal (The Independent, 2015). Thus, as the newspaper has confirmed to the author, the most explicitly racist and offensive responses will have been removed. Therefore, with The Independent unwilling or unable to provide these comments, they are absent from the analysis. Nevertheless, by focusing on online comments, it is conceivable that we gain an insight into racial processes that would not be possible offline (Sue, 2010).

At the time of writing, the article has been shared online over 9000 times, and, excluding those removed by moderators, 177 comments have been posted to the article comments section. These comments were analysed inductively and thematically. Setting aside the few comments that agreed with the article, in the first instance comments were coded into two broad groups. First, there are those comments that ‘ignore the column [and] write about the issue’ (Richardson & Stanyer, 2011, p. 996). Often seemingly without an engagement with the article’s content, these comments reproduce the hegemonic readings of Churchill’s life that I had sought to challenge. Second, there were comments in which readers pathologised me, as the author, in order to produce an explanatory framework that delegitimised the article and maintained the conditions of ‘post-racial’ white supremacy. Whilst both result in the maintenance of ‘post-racial’ white supremacy, the latter are my focus in this article. This set of comments were again thematically analysed and three key framings of me as the author were identified: a racist; a pathological mixed-race person; and a person lacking intelligence. The discussion that follows explores each of these themes in turn.

Discussion

‘Remi is a racist’: The ‘post-racial’ denial of white racism

Under the conditions of the ‘post-racial, where “race” no longer matters’ (Tate, 2016, p. 69), anti-racism faces a new set of challenges. How is it possible to work against a threat that is deniable and invisible (Goldberg, 2015)? The erasure of the long histories of racial formation sever contemporary racial conditions from their genealogies. Without an understanding of the white supremacist power structure that has characterised so much of modernity, any understanding of racist incidents is incomplete and inaccurate (Lentin, 2016). We are encouraged to see racist incidents in isolation. ‘Post-racial’ sensibilities place us in conditions that are ahistorical. Under such ahistoricism, ‘almost any form of racial statement’ may be characterised as racist (Song, 2014, p. 109). Thus, an author who discusses the racism of an apparent beacon of ‘post-raciality’ is inevitably met with a plethora of accusations of racism: ‘Remi is a racist!’ This was the most prevalent discourse. The following is representative of several:

… so this person is basically a racist, that is anti-white people. … I gather he is of mixed race and certainly has an enormous chip on his shoulder. I recommend he goes to live out his prejudices against us in a less tolerant country … like South Africa. That should suit us all nicely, thank you.

By offering an account that differs from the dominant representation of Churchill, my article threatens to disrupt white amnesia, and the logic of white supremacy. As such, this commenter needs to situate both author and article within the frame of ‘post-racial’ white supremacy. Thus, rather than a reasoned historical argument from a committed anti-racist, or public sociologist, the article is the diatribe of a Black mixed-race anti-white racist – any critique is discredited and invalidated, and ‘post-racial’ white supremacy remains undisturbed. As another reader put it: ‘It smacks of the author’s own racist agenda and anti-British feelings.’ Such an understanding relieves the reader of any cognitive dissonance arising from the disjuncture between the article and the popular representations of Churchill to which they are accustomed. The ‘post-racial’ encourages us to see racialised incidents as individualised expressions bereft of historical and structural context. With the white supremacist power structure erased, the ‘post-racial’ engenders what Song (2014, p. 108) terms ‘a culture of racial equivalence’. Thus, rather than racism describing a ‘historical and structured system of domination that sees whites exercise power over Blacks, racism becomes an inflated and imprecise term that describes racialisation’ (Song, 2014, p. 107). These conditions produce what Haslam (2016) terms a ‘conceptual creep’ in which anti-racism not only becomes a form of racism but becomes the only valid form of racism (see also Kapoor, 2013; Paradies, 2016). Under the conditions of the ‘post-racial’, racism persists whilst the anti-racist language ‘to identify, comprehend, or condemn’ is invalidated (Goldberg, 2015, p. 82).

As well as perpetuating a distortion of the semiotics of racism, the commenter draws upon an old and familiar trope in order to situate me as the Black with a ‘chip on his shoulder’ (Nayak, 2008). As the issues are shifted onto the pathological Black, the possibility for anti-racism is foreclosed. As Fanon (1967) and others (Gordon, 1997; Tate, 2016) have argued, Black resistance to a white supremacist status quo is quickly situated as ‘madness’ or deviance – this work acts to maintain that very status quo. Like the accusation of racism, this discourse serves to delegitimise anti-racist work and keep in place a system of ‘post-racial’ white supremacy. As I am positioned as somebody with anti-white prejudices, the white subject is positioned as my antithesis – the unquestioned rational norm. The final move of this commenter is to evoke a comparison with the South African racial context, of which there are at least two possible explanations. First, with a well-known history of racial apartheid, perhaps South Africa serves as a comparator that affirms the façade of a tolerant Britain. South Africa is a country that is characteristically racially intolerant, and, so the reasoning goes, Britain is not. The argument goes that I should be thankful to be British and stick to the ‘post-racial’ white supremacist scripts that hold hegemony in British society. For my interlocutor, the transgression of these white supremacist scripts means that I should be exiled. Or, second, perhaps the reader invokes the emergent discourse of white South Africans as the new victims of (‘reverse’) racism (Marcus, 2018), and therefore implies that, as the Black racist, I would be better suited to that mythological society.

Another commenter – attempting to situate the article within the dominant frames of ‘post-racial’ white supremacy – argued:

… as a BME academic and SJW [Social Justice Warrior] he seems to have a racist axe of his own to grind.

Through this commenter’s prognosis the critiques the article offers are rendered impotent, positioned as if they are merely the consequence of my racist disposition and my role as a ‘BME’ academic. As an academic of colour, I am always the ‘Other’: incapable of impartiality. The normalisation of whiteness means that only white thinkers are capable of impartiality – the pervasive construction of whiteness as racelessness means that whites are seen to be free from the biases of racialised positionalities. Thus, the works and writings of whites are rarely subject to accusations of racial bias – in part, this is how a collective white amnesia develops. Were whiteness to be destabilised as the norm, and the work of whites considered with scrutiny, readers might begin to disavow the myth of white objectivity (Johnson, 2018). If whiteness was not so positioned as the invisible norm, readers might be able to look critically at the Eurocentric and white supremacist biases that permeate British schooling and the media. This might engender the possibility for meaningful consideration of counter-narratives. But this would pose a real threat to the logic of ‘post-racial’ white supremacy.

The interpellation of anti-racist ‘BME’ scholars as so-called SJWs acts to perpetuate the construction of critical ‘BME’ voices as biased. Although the phrase has been in use for several decades, the emergence of ‘SJW’ in its pejorative form is a relatively recent phenomenon (Massanari & Chess, 2018). According to Massanari (2018), the term’s usage reached a critical mass in 2014, and operates as a ‘catch-all used to describe feminists, anti-racists, progressive activists, and the liberal media’ (n.p.). The ‘SJW’, like the ‘BME’ (and feminine) academic, is imagined as being irrational and emotional, rather than logical and considered (Massanari & Chess, 2018). In the popular imagination, ‘SJWs are also duplicitous, as they are motivated not by the actual causes they support, but by wanting others to believe they support said causes’ (Massanari, 2018, n.p.). This is perhaps a particular strand of online commentary that has been fomented in the highly active ‘alt-right’ digital space, and acts to shut down resistance to racism and oppression. It is this that we see operationalised through this reader’s comments. My critique of Churchill’s legacy is invalidated as, through the SJW trope, I am constructed as duplicitous, irrational and biased. Simultaneously, in another rhetorical move from the commenter, as I have a ‘racist axe to grind’, the ahistoricism of the ‘post-racial’ gives rise to an inflated definition of racism in which a lack of complexity and nuance ‘enables the widespread use of racism as a descriptor of racial situations or speech’ (Lentin, 2016, p. 36). This conceptual blunting makes anti-racist work increasingly difficult (Song, 2014).

In the following quote, another commenter draws upon the discourse of anti-whiteness in order to understand the article without shifting the ‘post-racial’ white supremacist lens:

Yawn….. Yet more anti white writing by this traitorous rag. The author clearly has a chip on their shoulder. Churchill was a great man, the greatest ever Briton and led us to victory against what in hindsight was pure evil. I like most normal British people are extremely proud of Churchill and his actions and despite what the author and his like say will never be ashamed of our great past.

Challenging dominant Eurocentric and white supremacist histories is constructed as an attack on whiteness. This is the nature of normalised and invisiblised ‘post-racial’ white supremacy. As the popular but unattributed adage goes, ‘when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression’. And so, under the conditions of the ‘post-racial’, a challenge to the status quo, built upon a collective white amnesia, can lead white readers to feel as though they are experiencing racial oppression. To question the historical underpinnings of white supremacy, to attempt to disrupt our shared ‘post-racial’ sensibilities, is to be a traitor. This is the logic of my interlocutor – we should all be deeply invested in the maintenance of this mythology. As such, to challenge the status quo is an act of treason. This is particularly the case for newspapers and media who, as ideological state apparatus (Althusser, 1971), have served the role of solidifying and perpetuating ideological white supremacy.

After perpetuating the familiar ‘chip on their shoulder’ trope, the commenter reaffirms his beliefs that Churchill is the ‘greatest ever Briton’. As they avow these beliefs, the commenter works to adopt the position of ‘normal’, and thus, as the author, I am ‘abnormal’. This is a disavowal and disregard of the criticisms of the article – they are merely a consequence of my ‘abnormality’. The commenter shows a deep and unwavering commitment to ideological white supremacy – their views will not be disrupted. As critics are positioned as ‘abnormal’ and part of a problematised group (‘the author and his like’), any cognitive dissonance or calls for reflection are avoided – the threat is thwarted and the ideology of ‘post-racial’ white supremacy is maintained. We see this again in the following comment:

… but then as a coloured anti-British libtard of course you would not like one of the greatest ENGLISHMEN of all time.

As the article has the potential to pierce the commenter’s white amnesia, rather than an article based on historical evidence, the commenter sees the article as the consequence of my being a ‘coloured anti-British libtard’. Any potential cognitive dissonance is resolved as non-counter-hegemonic alternative explanations are found: in the first instance, it is my race or my ‘colour’ that means I, and therefore the article, is biased. Again, this is reliant upon whiteness being positioned as the invisible norm: perhaps this association between Englishness and whiteness – a key component of white amnesia (Hesse, 1997) – is what the commenter reproduces as they contrast me with Churchill (‘ENGLISHMEN’). Much like the previous commenter who argued I had a racist axe to grind, the article is then positioned as a consequence of my ‘anti-British’ values. With Britishness so dependent upon a revisionist white supremacist history (Hesse, 1997), it should be no surprise that to resist white amnesia is constructed as being anti-British.

What all of the commenters share is a reading of the article that is in abstraction from its historical and contemporary racial conditions – it is this that enables commenters to position the author within this discourse (‘racist’/ ‘anti-white’/ ‘chip on shoulder’ / biased). In keeping with the logic of ‘post-racial’ white supremacy, this, rather than any historical validity, becomes the explanation for the article.

Remi is confused: Pathologising mixedness

Several commenters sought to draw explanations from my mixed-race identity. To identify me racially, commenters presumably must have had to do some research. This demonstrates a clear desire to find an explanation for the article’s content. The following comment is a prime example of this discourse:

He is a mixed race man desperately trying to insist upon the importance of his own identity. Sadly without any great heroes he must tear ours down.

As my racial identity is foregrounded as the reason for my writing, the possibility for legitimate anti-racist critique is precluded. The comments are underpinned by ‘post-racial’ logic, and thus act to perpetuate both the logic and conditions of the ‘post-racial’. In the comments the aggressor draws upon longstanding pathological stereotypes of the mixed-race subject. Living in a world stratified by Black and white, so the reasoning goes, the mixed-race person is caught in-between cultures. Perhaps this is why I am perceived to be so ‘desperately’ trying to insist upon the importance of my own identity. Of course, despite its persistence and durability, this is the kind of racist thinking that the ‘post-racial’ obfuscates. As I am situated as the confused and pathological mixed-race man, my arguments are delegitimised and positioned within a ‘post-racial’ white supremacist frame.

In the assertion that I am without ‘any great heroes’, the commenter reveals further their white amnesia: their imbrication in a Eurocentric and white supremacist understanding of the world. If we recognise the way white amnesia pervades schooling, academia, the university, and society generally, it is conceivable that this commenter is unaware of the vast wealth of Black and Black mixed-race heroes I might draw inspiration from. The epistemology of ignorance, an unwillingness to see beyond the normalisation of whiteness, may render it impossible for this commenter to consider counter-narratives. Certainly, this is what seems to be the case in response to the article. This may too be what disables the commenter from recognising Black heroes. A racist gaze will never truly see Black heroism, or Black humanity (Yancy, 2017). For the commenter, then, it is my jealousy, frustration at my inability to attain whiteness, which motivates my critique of Churchill’s legacy. Without due consideration, the legitimacy of the article is invalidated, white amnesiac readings of history are protected, and contemporary conditions of ‘post-racial’ white supremacy are maintained. The following example also draws upon my mixedness:

I find it amusing that the author of this piece so vehemently identifies and makes a living out of the black half of his identity. God knows what his white grandparents make of him.

The commenter begins by reducing my identity to that of two halves; a Black half and a white half. From the outset there is a refusal to see the complexity I attribute to my own identity. In his work Black Bodies, White Gazes, George Yancy (2017) discusses how the white gaze threatens to erase and fragment Black bodies. In this comment, we see how this threat extends to online platforms. This flattening of my identity is counterintuitive to the scholarship and activism that has fought to recognise a totality of mixedness that moves beyond the sum of its parts. However, it is this flattening that allows the commenter to formulate an explanation that sits within the frame of ‘post-racial’ white supremacy whilst still drawing on ideas of blood quantum.

As the commenter continues, it is argued that my Blackness is something that I make ‘a living out of’. Of course, in ‘post-racial’ contexts where the historical and contemporary conditions of racism are rendered invisible, a void is left and there is a need for a ‘post-racial’ explanation for my anti-racist work (Tate, 2016). Indeed, under these conditions, it cannot be critical analysis that I offer, for there is nothing to be critical of. The comment is simultaneously constituted by, and constitutive of, ‘post-racial’ logic. My motivation is reduced to being purely financial. Thus, rather than someone committed to challenge racism, I am positioned as somebody who exploits their racial identity in order to make money. My critiques are delegitimised as, through the lens of the ‘post-racial’, they are positioned as being financially driven and therefore potentially corrupted. In a society where whiteness is normalised (Dyer, 1997), my Blackness means I am inherently biased – I am perceptually flawed and thus, the white gaze fixes me in a position where I am unable to rupture the logic of the ‘post-racial’.

As the commenter apparently finds it ‘amusing’ that I identify with my ‘black half’, something that evoked a response (not always humour!) from several commenters, there is a disregard of the long and complex histories of the racialisation of Black mixed-race men. Once more, then, the ‘post-racial’ erasure of racial histories determines how I am interpreted by the reader. If there was greater recognition of the historical processes that have shaped the racialisation of Black mixed-race men, this commenter may perhaps not find it so ‘amusing’ that I identify with my ‘black half’. The commenter might understand that lived experiences of racism have played a role in why I, and so many others, have a strong identification with Blackness. They might also observe how the Black community have so often taken responsibility for the care and welfare of mixed-race children (Hill Collins, 2004). An understanding that does not sever contemporary society from its formative historical racial conditions would recognise the role that a de facto one-drop rule has played and continues to play in shaping social outcomes, and how individuals identify (Aspinall & Song, 2013; Senna, 1998). To borrow from Tim Wise (2009, p. 14), in contexts like the UK, ‘to be biracial hardly erases one salient fact: a person so designated will typically be seen as a member of whichever group is lowest in the racial hierarchy. So, to be black and white in terms of parentage is to be black.’ The commenter might understand that an experientially developed episteme of Blackness leads many Black mixed-race men and their families to the recognition that the white gaze renders us all part of the Black same (Joseph-Salisbury, 2018a, 2018b; Yancy, 2017), but this is what the ‘post-racial’ and white amnesia occlude.

These comments are shaped by a white supremacist logic that sees any criticism of the conditions of white supremacy as pathological. This logic is given strength through the normalisation and the compounding logic of the ‘post-racial’. If we are beyond race, a critique of white supremacy can only be illogical, misplaced or delusionary. As (inherently rational) white people, so the reasoning goes, my grandparents cannot share my counter-hegemonic delusions. For them to do so, would be irrational.

Remi is a ‘knucklehead’: Lack of ‘intelligence’

Questioning the author’s intelligence allowed commenters to locate any dissonance with me, rather than with their white amnesia. Thus, ‘post-racial’ white supremacy remained protected. The comment discussed earlier, in which I was referred to as a ‘libtard’, can be interpreted as an allusion to a lack of intelligence (invoked through ‘retard’) combined with left-wing views (invoked through the US term ‘liberal’) (Oxford Living Dictionaries, n.d.). Historically, the term retard has been used to describe people constructed as having ‘learning disabilities’. Contemporarily its primary use is as a pejorative to denigrate somebody’s intelligence. Here a denigration of my intelligence as the author acts to delegitimise the article and left-wing views more generally. Not only is my analysis the consequence of ‘liberal’ bias, but an inseparable association between so-called ‘liberal’ views and a lack of intelligence is (re)inscribed. In this process, the threat to white amnesia is nullified, and ‘post-racial’ white supremacy is maintained. Another commenter drew upon this discourse as he sought to locate my article within the frame of ‘post-racial’ white supremacy:

He is obviously a mate of that black fella who is a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and wanted to topple Rhodes Statue outside his college … you wouldnt believe It possible! There must be some disconnect between their colour and brainbox…..

Whilst such an explicitly racist comment might appear to break with ‘post-racial’ norms, it is in fact through the ‘post-racial’ that such racisms are abstracted from wider sociohistorical contexts (Song, 2014). This abstraction creates possibilities for people to express ‘themselves in ways as blatantly and explicitly racist as they choose with little risk of being called on it’ (Goldberg, 2015, p. 72). This is no doubt compounded by the relative anonymity of online comments sections (Sue, 2010). Setting aside the microaggressive function of the comment, the commenter again situates the article within the frames of the ‘post-racial’. As it is suggested that I have some kind of mental impairment, the reader disregards the possibility for legitimate arguments in the article. They understand the article to be solely the misguided writing of somebody lacking full cognitive functioning. This work maintains the ‘post-racial’ myth. As my apparent mental impairment is related to my ‘colour’, the commenter draws upon longstanding racist stereotypes of Black intellectual inferiority. Using similar logic, other commenters questioned the validity of my position in academia: as one commenter said, ‘to think this thing could become a professor one day’. It is similar logic that led another commenter to remark that, ‘Remi Joseph-Salisbury is British post-graduate education, 2016. Now we see why British higher education has terminal problems.’ In both comments as my expertise (and humanity) are brought into question, the dissonance is shifted from white amnesia to the ineptitude of the author. Once again, the logic of ‘post-racial’ white supremacy is maintained and protected.

Conclusion

This article has shone a light on just some of the ways that the ‘post-racial’ turn has impacted upon attempts to engage in anti-racist work. Positioning the backlash to my own anti-racist writing at the centre of the analysis, I have shown that any attempt to disrupt or deviate from hegemonic white supremacy – whether historically verifiable or not – will be met with strong criticism and opposition.

‘Post-racial’ hegemony is dependent upon white historical amnesia. That is, it is only conceivable that society has overcome race and racism, if that history of race and racism is diluted. To put it another way, if the true history of race, racism and Empire is grappled with, contemporary ‘post-racial’ hegemony becomes inconceivable. In light of this, we should not be surprised that anti-racist critique faces such strong challenges. These challenges, or alternative explanations, delegitimise the intended nature of that work and make anti-racist Public Sociology all the more difficult. This is the contemporary reality of working to challenge a threat that is denied.

In this article I have shown that the ‘post-racial’ turn brings with it conditions of racial equivalency in which the anti-racist who talks about race is subject to accusations of racism. Similarly, the ‘post-racial’ erasure of racism creates conditions in which the anti-racist is located as anti-white, anti-British or as having the proverbial chip on their shoulder. Each of these explanations nullifies anti-racist work, protects and reinforces the logic of ‘post-racial’ white supremacy. I also showed how ‘post-racialists’ drew upon my mixed-race identity, as they rejected the article’s content and sought to find an explanation consistent with the logic of ‘post-racial’ white supremacy. As such, I was positioned as the confused and/or biased mixed-race author who suffered from an identity crisis. Again, through this reasoning, the counter-hegemonic article content is nullified and hegemonic white supremacy maintained. Finally, as commenters sought explanations that fit the frame of ‘post-racial’ white supremacy, I was positioned as a pathological individual, lacking in intelligence, with cognitive impairment. Whilst the routes may differ, the result is the same: anti-racism and counter-hegemonic arguments are rejected in favour of explanations that do not threaten or disrupt collective ‘white amnesia’ and ‘post-racial’ white supremacy.

As I have argued, many whites are deeply committed to the maintenance of white supremacy: their sense of self is inextricably tied to white hegemony. Thus, resistance to anti-racist counter-narratives should not surprise us. As Coates (2015, p. 143) argues, ‘To awaken them is to reveal that they are an empire of humans and, like all empires of humans, are built on the destruction of the body. It is to stain their nobility, to make them vulnerable, fallible, breakable humans.’ For many whites, wilful ignorance is far more comfortable than an anti-racist awakening.

Drawing on white amnesia, the system of ‘post-racial’ white supremacy has a remarkable capacity to maintain, protect and perpetuate itself. These are the processes made evident by the article comments. As the tools to make anti-racist critique are under threat, as anti-racists, we must become increasingly aware of the ‘post-racial’ challenges we face.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

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