Violence and violation are at the heart of racism

The presentations

Supporting the motion

Pnina Werbner

We live in scary times. Racism and brutal racial violence seem to be everywhere around us. We are witnessing the rise of an assertive, publicly visible white supremacist movement in the US, drawing millions of followers, with members of the Ku Klux Klan marching brazenly in front of TV cameras shouting openly racist slogans, its members apparently endorsed by the US President and his close advisors. There has been a precipitous increase in publicly reported hate crimes not only in America but in Britain too, and alongside this the rise of explicitly racist, anti-immigrant populist parties and their leaders throughout Europe. On our TV screens we watch nightly the slaughter of Rohinga Muslims in Burma, in what amounts to state-sponsored genocide. Israeli settlers attack and murder helpless Palestinians while grabbing their lands, apparently with impunity, backed by a right-wing Israeli government, while the international community looks the other away. Not only that: As authors of a recent AAA Newsletter lament in an article on White Nationalism, ‘we are faced with the dismal reality that the [election] of a first African American presidency ended not with a movement towards racial progress but towards an overt racist backlash’.

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Figure 1.

Racist imaginaries of three folk devils (cartoon by Hava Gillon).

You have all seen the images, just as you’ve seen the violent images of black men and some black women being shot dead by police, often with no provocation whatsoever. You have all no doubt seen images of a murdered young English MP, of peaceful church attenders slaughtered in Charleston, South Carolina, and of a young black teenager killed walking innocently through his Miami neigbourhood, all murdered by racists and white supremacists. Most of the time, the perpetrators get away with it. I don’t think there is any need for me to elaborate further.

But these manifestations of racial violence are not what moves my argument. I am not simply stating the obvious – that racist expressions are often brutally violent or that racist slurs violate personal dignity, as the philosopher Charles Taylor has argued – that non-recognition or misrecognition can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being.

No. My argument here is different and, I believe, more profound. First, I want to propose that race and racism is not simply a discourse or even ideology as is often argued but that – seen from the perspective of the racists – racism is a visceral, atavistic social imaginary, embodying deep-seated psychological fears of difference and sameness, animated by imagined folk devils. When I said we live in scary times I meant it quite literally – racism is generated by and builds upon fear, rage and deep resentment.

Second, I propose that, seen from the point of view of the victims of racism, beneath the surface of apparently differential racisms lurks a single, violent message: The Other must be effaced and subordinated – physically, culturally, economically and politically. Hence what distinguishes racism, xenophobia, ethnic violence and state terror from ordinary political ethnicity is its violence and violations. Racists target the human body – perceived as a source of dangerous and contagious pollution and threatening physicality; they target collective cultural symbols – mosques, flags, graves – for destruction; they expropriate and destroy property and sources of livelihood; they spread deadly, false conspiracy theories, and they efface the political voice of the racialised Other. In other words, if racisms are many and the political-cum-historical contexts in which they arise unique, the violations of racism are familiar and repetitive – public humiliation, denial, enslavement, pogroms, ethnic cleansing, rape, murder, torture, destruction, expropriation, starvation, industrial death, genocide.

If I were Mary Douglas I would say that racism in Europe and America – though not perhaps in Latin America – is constituted from the beginning by category violation: Race violates the purity of blood of white people and their privileged superiority, whether by proximity or miscegenation. ² In his book ‘Race’, Nature and Culture and elsewhere (Wade, 1993, 2004), Peter Wade defines ‘race’ or ‘racial discourse’ as a historically inflected idea about human difference in which selected visible (or indeed invisible) biological and cultural differences, regarded as hereditary, are naturalised and inferiorised as embodied, essential human nature. Missing from this definition, however, is the visceral disgust, fear and aggression that so-called ‘race’ invokes. This is where racism and my own analysis begin.

There seems to be agreement among scholars of race that since Second World War there has been an erasure and delegitmation of discourses of race in Europe and America (Goldberg, 2008; Stoller, 2002; Wade, 2010, 2015). ² Political correctness and euphemistic references to ‘culture’ replaced explicit references to race. But if there was indeed such a moment when race talk went underground or was privatised, as these scholars contend, the present moment is one in which race and racism, as we have seen, have been shockingly and brutally visibilised and legitimised.

Before going on to elaborate further on my main argument, I need to make two things clear. First, I am not arguing that all violence is racist. There are many forms of violence including sexual and domestic violence, sectarian violence and nationalist violence, which may share some features with racism but are not racist. Second, I am not arguing that ethnocentrism is the same as racism. Ethnocentrism, the valorisation of one’s own culture or society above others, is – let’s face it – normal and common. Most people think their own culture is good, possibly better than other cultures, and sometimes that some cultures – say, Japanese culture or American Indian culture – are more attractive than others (Levi-Strauss). I am not arguing that all those who voted for Brexit are racists. But what is undoubtedly the case is that ethnocentrism can easily descend into racism in response to competing interests or perceived threats (Bar-Tal, 1990). The sign for this shift is always, I put to you, violation and violence, often cycles of revenge. That is why multiculturalism is such an important framework for relations of peaceful tolerance. Multiculturalism teaches the need to respect other cultures and their rights to equal visibility and recognition in the public sphere.

But, you may ask, what about institutional racism – where is the violence there? After all, most of the time racism only surfaces in statistics showing discrimination. My answer to this is to invoke the example of Barack Obama who dared to break the glass ceiling, the taken-for-granteds of everyday racism. As Susan Anderson (2016) writes in her book White Rage, ‘the vitriol heaped on Obama was simply unprecedented.’ The hatred started, it seems, when he was only a candidate. In his first year in office there was a 400 percent increase in death threats. Facebook eventually shut down a page where hundreds answered yes to the question ‘Should Obama be killed?’ He was accused of being a Muslim, a Kenyan, an un-American monstrosity. He was repeatedly called a nigger, depicted as a chimpanzee. His crime was to buck the ramparts of institutional racism. The violence against him was only visibilised because he did not accept his place in the racial hierarchy. But that violence was there all along.

Hence, the challenge facing anti-racist scholars, I propose, is to grasp the visceral, atavistic nature of the social imaginaries and the deep-seated psychological fears of difference and sameness that constitute contemporary racisms and their mutations in the face of changing historical circumstances. A common approach has it that the folk devil of racist imaginaries is a displaced figure of collective anxieties and fears and, as such, an arbitrary scapegoat embodying racist paranoid convictions that only cultural, ethnic and racial purity can stem the breakdown of social order and the collapse of society. This view sees the racist gallery of folk devils, and the differential or cultural racist fantasies of which they are constituted, as mere facades disguising more unitary, fundamental processes in which a constellation of Others – blacks, Jews, liberals, Asians, Muslims – is constructed as a threat to the purity and order of the nation, the ethnos, seen as a moral community (see Figure 1 above). In this interpretation, beneath the surface of apparently different racist imaginaries lurks a single, violent message: The Other must be effaced and subordinated – physically, culturally, economically and politically.

Against this singularity, Wieviorka (1995) has argued that the logic of racism is a dual logic – of inferiorisation and differentiation; of subordination and exclusion. The duality seems to explain the three central historical exemplars of racism that form, as Etienne Balibar (1991) recognises, our fundamental imaginaries of racism: American slavery, colonialism (including apartheid) and the Holocaust. But the racisms of late modernity, as Stoller (2002) notes, are altogether more subtle and insidious. In our era of heightened self-consciousness and cultural reflexivity, a further principle or logic of racism becomes apparent. This is suggested by Zygmunt Bauman (1993) who argues, citing Levi-Strauss, that the uncertainties of modernity crystallise around the disturbing figure of the alien or stranger. We deal with the stranger in our midst, Bauman contends, through two strategic alternatives: Anthropophagy – literally, cannibalism, and by extension, ingestion, assimilation; or anthropoemy – literally, vomiting, and by extension, expulsion, exile, incarceration. The first ‘assimilates’ the strangers to neighbours, the second merges them with the aliens. Together, he says, ‘they posit a genuine “either/or”: Conform or be damned, be like us or do not overstay your visit, play the game by the rules or be prepared to be kicked out from the game altogether’ (Bauman, 1993: 163). The impulse of the modern nation state is to pulverise its ethnic peripheries and stubborn minorities in the cultural blender of nationalism.

The array of imaginary folk devils which I have labelled the Slave, the Witch and the Fanatic have their roots in three parallel racist ontologies. All three ontologies share the paradoxical feature that violent racists perceive themselves to be defending the nation against the threat of an evil aggressor and potential usurper.

Where exploitation and subordination are the key defining principles of racism, the fear is of the physically powerful, wild, out-of-control slave. This is the dangerous street mugger who threatens the law and order of society, as Hall et al. (1978) show in Policing the Crisis, a figure reflecting fear of insurrection.

Against that, the witch crystallises fears of the hidden, disguised, malevolent stranger, of a general breakdown of trust, of a nation divided against itself. Your neighbour may be a witch who wants to destroy you. He or she is culturally indistinguishable in almost every respect because the witch masquerades as a non-alien. The nefarious Jewish merchant, icon of suppressed greed, may be said to undermine the integrity of the ego. Hence, long-settled middleman minorities – Jews, Indians, Chinese – although often wealthy, publicly compliant and assimilated, become intermittently the object of extreme destructive violence or national purification. Anti-Semitism invokes the folk devil of the Jew as the nefarious feeder on the blood of children, the avaricious capitalist and perpetrator of violent global conspiracies.

Finally, the Muslim, the religious fanatic, the violent terrorist, negates – indeed despises – all these impulses motivated by the id and ego. Islamophobia is the fear of the super-ego gone wild. At stake is not the battle between Christendom and Islam, as many Muslims believe. What is scary about Islam is the way that it evokes the spectre of a past puritanical Christianity, a moral crusade, European sectarian wars, the Crusaders, the Inquisition, the attack on the permissive society. The Islamic fanatic is not a disguised, assimilated threat as the Jewish ‘witch’ was; ‘he’ is not subservient and bestial like the black ‘slave’. He is upfront, morally superior, openly aggressive, denying the morality of the promiscuous society and the validity of other cultures – in short, a different kind of folk devil altogether. He is a figure constructed by fearful elites that may nevertheless legitimise far cruder forms of biological racism. Anti-fundamentalist images provide these racists with a legitimising discourse against Muslims, to which may be added the usual epithets directed against all racialised groups: That they are dirty, promiscuous, licentious, violent and so forth. Muslim terrorists prove that the Koran itself and the Prophet of Islam are intrinsically ‘evil’ and promote violence. In some ways Muslims have now replaced Jews as the conspiratorial hidden witches, whereas for Muslims, Jews and Americans are seen as the new Crusaders, openly violent, inhuman and destructive.

To sum up my argument then: Racist folk devils are no mere illusions and fantasies. They represent deep-seated, atavistic, real fear, displaced onto strangers and what strangers come to represent symbolically. Racism, the racist imagination, is fundamentally violent and violating.¹

Kit (Christopher) Davis

Race is not a professional study for me. It’s just that race is something that follows me around and fights with me like something out of a bad screwball comedy. So, this is a bit of an auto-ethnography. I am going to start with three ethnographic instances and we’re going to draw out of them some broader principles that will allow us to find a way forward. It’s appropriate to be having this discussion right now because sixty years ago this year nine black students attempted to enter a previously all white high-school in Little Rock Arkansas and the governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus called the National Guard to block their entry and then president Eisenhower in turn called the army in to enforce integration. That’s vignette number one now. It was also the point when I first discovered white racism. I remember asking my mother ‘what is happening, why are they doing this?’ My mother very wisely said ‘I don’t know’ because, really, why should she speak for them.

Number two: A little more than 50 years ago the SCLC, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, brought the struggle from the South to Chicago as a way of broadening the struggle to include economic as well as racial disparities. They were also attempting to desegregate housing. Chicago is an extremely segregated city – it’s one of the most segregated cities in the country. There were covenants by which people promised not to sell properties to Blacks and Jews. The idea was to walk in peaceful protest through all-white areas that were directly adjacent to all-black areas in which black people were paying more in rent than white people across the street were paying for mortgages. Martin Luther King came. These walks, they were exercises in militant non-violence, took place on Sunday afternoons and I went along. You had to have a briefing before you began where you taught not to fight back and to remain passive in the face of violence, to take off your earrings and jewellery so that people couldn’t hurt you, and also, at a certain point, to kneel and pray. You can catch glimpses of it in Raoul Peck’s recent film ‘I am not your Negro’ which is a celebration of James Baldwin’s work, but in the background you see a tremendous amount of the violence. There were a series of critical events, obviously, during that time, but it was critical particularly in terms of my own life and changed my life in a direct way. First of all, King said that the white violence was worse than anything he had ever seen in the south and that he had knelt to pray with one eye open. People threw things, they screamed, they could hardly physically express the magnitude of their hatred, and that included women and children as well as men. There were swastikas, there were flags saying ‘white is might and might is right,’ they adapted little jingles that they sang about wishing to kill all the ‘niggers’, or that they wished they were Alabama troopers so they could kill us all. It was quite extraordinary. You would always tell new people coming along to keep walking, because they would be so astonished by this. But for me, first of all instead of feeling frightened I felt jubilant, because you look at this and say ‘this is what I can do by simply walking down the street. I can make you act like this’. And when I started reading Foucault on the distribution of power over the population, while everyone else said there’s no centre of power here, I remembered that. Everyone plays a part in power and if you get out of place you can disrupt the power system. It was the first time I had seen police there to protect me, I had never seen that before. Also each week the number of protesters grew and they included people who seemed other than the usual white folks I knew. I had an integrated background, but all the white people I knew were like anthropologists, they were on the Left, they wore ethnic clothing and jewellery, they were part of the CND. You would expect to see them at a march. But there were also other people with bubble hairdos and plastic hand bags – just normal looking white people that you would never expect to see or think were on your side. I learned that I myself had a prejudice that I didn’t realise I had. That was a learning experience for me and for them. They would say things like ‘my family don’t know I’m here, but I couldn’t possibly just let another week of this go on without coming.’ That’s ethnographic example number two, and I want to emphasise there the element of choice as well.

The third thing was teaching structuralism in the University of Michigan. I remember once somebody making the observation that Levi Strauss was writing Elementary Structures of Kinship while the Second World War was going on, and there was no trace of the politics of the Holocaust and of that mass destruction in his text. So in some way, in order to have a futuristic approach, I’m taking a page from Levi-Strauss’s book because he taught us to pay attention to the underlying logics of things that create the different manifestations of things in varying times and places, and that account for both repetition and difference, the system of transformations. I think it’s important if we’re thinking in terms of being open to the future that we think in terms of looking at the underlying logic. On this basis, I would argue that we understand racism for what it is, which is to say it’s one visible form of a type of political/personal passion, itself combining two inherently precarious, and therefore tending to violence, passionate ideologies. These are supremacism and purism. They are emotional ideologies that are a way of negotiating our creaturely condition as empathic predators, to which I would now add an idea, a missing piece provided by Andrew Irving in conversation last night, we are also paranoid! So, we’re empathic, paranoid predators. It means that every time we try to dispossess others of something that is rightfully theirs we have to protect ourselves from our own empathy by making that other deserving of the violence we are perpetrating on them.

Equally, supremacism and purism are two unnatural states, they’re precarious states. We are always conscious of the fact that they need consistent reassertion and consistent defence because otherwise they’ll decline into nothingness. So we’re constantly then in a state of anxiety. In addition, as passions they are emotions in search of an object. They are formulations of resentments that are fundamental to human beings. I would draw attention to the work of Melanie Klein or Lacan or early psychoanalysts who look at the fact that the alternatives to feelings of affection and belonging are to feel excluded, resentful and cast out. Shakespeare was very good on this. Characters like Iago or Don John are just pissed off and for no other reason than that they’re excluded and they’re bastards and they don’t like it and they are going to make everybody pay. So we have to just recognise that these are passions. But, in addition, coded into our philosophy of being, in whatever it is we mean by us, through people like Hegel and Nietzsche, there’s always also an unhappy consciousness. There’s always also a master-slave dialectic. The notion of freedom is very heavily coded with its opposition to slavery and that’s another problem that we have to deal with. So if we’re going to begin to have a properly anthropological approach to the problem which is to understand it both in its particularities of time and space but also in its commonalities across time and space, we need to understand that these are the driving forces and that they will produce three kinds of violence which we have all experienced in our life time.

The first is vigilantism, which can be communal or collective violence. It can be things like lynching, it can be things like Faubus calling the National Guard, it can be individual acts of attempted terrorism. The point is that they are all appealing to a higher law that is above the law of the state, and they are justified by this broader purpose, and in fact one of the satisfactions is breaking the law to show how supremely important this thing is.

The second kind of violence is structural violence in the sense of obviously abiding deprivation and imposition of disabling constraints on others which are then normalised and racialised and made and perceived as a reflection of the others’ degraded ontological condition, rather than as something that is imposed on them in order to create the purism and the supremacism that one is feeling oneself.

The third element is the psychic violation in the sense of the mentalities of both actors. Both the person that is the victim of persecution and the supremacist are psychically distorted by these emotions. In fact they take bodily forms as well.

If we think about it this way, in terms of the psychic life of power and in terms of the fact that underneath it all, psychologically, even in terms of infant development, these are things that people think of as fundamental to human coming into being. Thinking in this way allows us to tolerate, because we have to, the abiding nature of these passions. In other words, not to hope for a time when they will ever go away because they are part of our self-construction. An infant is incredibly uncaring about whether or not its mother has any sleep, whether or not she is in a good mood or a bad mood. It just wants to eat. It is only later that it comes to say ‘oh’. Because these operate at the level of individual psyche, they operate to frame experience. It is a position one can occupy and I’m thinking also of what people would say in the Congo using the mentality of a sorcerer. There is a word in Swahili (chuki) to describe the kind of rage you feel when you see something really inappropriate and impossible such as a child talking back to a parent, or a parent being rude to a child, or when somebody comes along and you have to share your food. And it is just really deeply annoying. The average person gets over that, a sorcerer does not. And if they take against you, every time they see you, you just piss them off and they are not going to be happy until they have made medicine against you that will kill you. And when you are dead they will be the first person at your funeral, because they want to be sure to see you in the ground. And the problem then is the fixity of that emotion, I think, because we all experience that irritation that becomes a proof that sorcery exists. We all could feel the same feeling and that is how we know that other people feel worse than we do. So I am saying that the persistence of these passions is what matters when we begin to think about the future and that is why I wanted to kind of cut through the flesh, so to speak, of racism. I like that moment in Terminator, especially the first Terminator, when he cuts into his arm and you realise that it is a machine underneath. But your first feeling is ‘oh, my God.’ It’s a bit like that cut through the flesh of the machine. The sentiments appear unchanging but of course they change because they adapt. And that is why I want to go back to the fact that when we now look at things like Charlottesville and when we look at the current arguments and compare them to what things were 50 years ago, you see it is the same but it has also significantly changed because the social circumstances around those feelings have changed, and because they are debatable in different ways, and because among other things you can fight back. Until the Black Panther party came along, the idea of fighting back was kind of not a thing.

So what I want to then argue, again thinking futuristically, is to look in our contemporary society at the role that algorithms play in this model, in this kind of constant repetition, both the newness and repetition. So the encoding of racism or of ideologies in algorithm is crucial and I just want to take the example of Dylann Roof who was the young man who went to a prayer meeting at a historically black church in South Carolina and who shot and killed nine people. He refused to have a psychiatric assessment as part of his defence. He left a manifesto that was what he wanted to be his only statement. He did not come from a racist household, he had black friends as a young man, but he was affected by the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida (the young man to whom Pnina referred), who was walking through a neighbourhood, his own neighbourhood in fact, and some self-appointed security person decided that he should not be there and he ended up being shot dead. So Dylann Roof went online, the Southern Poverty Law Center has recorded this, to look at black on white crime. He googled it and what popped up was a whole series of bits of evidence left by rightwing groups that itemised and gave individual names of instances of black on white crime. What did not pop up was the rarity of such crimes. So what we see happening is a weaponised artificial intelligence, that’s one way of putting it. Artificial intelligence learns from every single click that you make on every single thing. Every single click you make on Facebook and all your friends. Data gathering organisations harvest information and they attach it now to psychological profiling. So they have a sense of who you are, what you are as an individual mind. Therefore if I were to google black on white crime, I would get a different set of things from Dylann Roof. The Southern Poverty Law Center has been trying to get Google to acknowledge and to change their algorithmic methods, so that it cannot be gamed in this way.

Going back to the open occupancy demonstrations, what I want to emphasise is that people choose. It is not where you begin, it is what you choose at a critical moment that makes you who you are. And what I like, not only about my own learning, was seeing that also ordinary white people, to whom the proposition had never been put, had made a choice in that moment. And what I am saying now in terms of our point of view as anthropologists is that this emphasises the significance of the social, and of the politics of the social, and it emphasises the future. What we see with algorithms is that they reinforce passions, they are meant to be addictive. They diminish choice and freedom because they do not allow us to think outside of the box. This is our challenge, to be able to find ways to continue to regroup, continue to reform.

The discussion

Soumhya Venkatesan (Manchester): Kit and Pnina focused on the psyche, on passions, fear and so on. John and Pete focused more on social processes – we got a sense of how care can be at the heart of racist practices, and also how conviviality can generate racist hierarchies in particular ways. John and Pete, where would you place the psyche? And Pnina and Kit, what about the social processes of everyday racism? How do you see those kind of micro, everyday racisms that Pete, in particular, raised.

John: When you get to the level of the psyche, the social is already there. Can I see all these things – the passions and the angers? Yes, I certainly can. But I see them as expressed in social terms and, importantly, as learned, and in that sense, predicated on class, racial and gender positionings.

Pete: I would say that if you’re going to concentrate on the other, then you should also concentrate on the self, on the formation of the self. You can’t understand the other without the self in the same way that you cannot understand violence without non-violence or equality without hierarchy. Also you have to understand the ambivalence of the other, which is that it is not only hated and reviled, but also desired.

Pnina: I don’t normally write about the psyche. Fanon, Homi Bhabha and a whole host of people did focus on this issue in relation to racism, exclusion, colonialism, and I found these writings very productive in this context. But I want now to say something about the structural processes of exclusion. I don’t think that everyday racism is so simple or hidden. There was a program on the BBC about the spike in hate crime after Brexit. This was described as racism by the program-makers, but was in fact directed at Polish migrants. They took it for granted that hate crime defined race, and so Poles were understood as a race. In relation to this I want to bring up Stuart Hall, who said that class is a modality through which race is experienced. And that kind of links into the structural processes – you can’t separate class from race. You probably can’t separate gender, age and various other intersectional features from race. When you talk about everyday racism, which can be very pernicious, you’re thinking about it in terms of these modalities. I accept what Charles Taylor says that this kind of violation is demeaning. It diminishes the person.

Kit: I think it is important for us to realise that the psyche of a social creature is entirely social; [although] it can be separated out analytically as a way of looking at dispositions of particular individuals and choices, and I think there is nothing out of keeping in terms of both care and conviviality. I think those two things are complimentary and the issue is the matter of extending boundaries of care and of equality to others. But to pull back just a little bit too, it’s important not to confuse race with colour. Why was it important under Nazism for Jews to wear stars? It was because they were not visible otherwise. So to think of this as something that is based on a visible provocation of otherness is to make a fundamental mistake in terms of looking at how the mechanism operates, and also to say that if we take social construction seriously, as we must as anthropologists, we can see that it affects bodily practices in very significant ways, and particularly in terms of oppression: People knowing where not to go, people knowing how to position themselves, and, particularly in relationships of servitude, of being able to be present enough to touch the other, but also of being absent enough. Both [the raced and the racing] bodies are conditioned by hierarchy and supremacy. What I like about the idea of the psychic is that it maintains the possibility of choice. People can decide to be other and to take a position that moves them away from racism. If we don’t recognise that we end up making an ontological mistake, creating a category of ‘racist’ that exists permanently and enduringly. There is no hope there for social change and I think it's the very challenges [they encounter] that allow people to have to choose between positions. Race/being raced is not a natural thing, it's a political position.

On micro-aggressions: In the old days when we were integrating things you had to put up with a lot more than that. You were bodily and socially informed to be an integrator. If you want to know the conditions under which I was brought up, there is a wonderful ethnography that came out in 1945 called Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City. The first part is a sociology of the black community in Chicago; the second part is an ethnography that gives a description of social classes and modes of living within the black community. The last chapter in that book is called ‘Advancing the Race’ and it's a category of thinking about political struggle. I was brought up in that category. Advancing the race meant that everything you did and everything you were was about making a way for other people. You had to be twice as well prepared and twice as armed and if you messed up, nobody black was ever going to get a chance after you. What I am saying is that race isn’t something that you are passively and unthinkingly. It's something that comes into being, and it has a heritage and a tradition including a heritage of political struggle. Now we have advanced it to the point where we can think about micro-aggressions.

Soumhya: Does racism always have to somehow feature whiteness?

Kit: I don't think it does always have to feature whiteness. That's partly why I’ve tried to look at a mechanism that can apply in many different circumstances. One of the controversies about banning discrimination against people of Dalit origin in Britain was that there was no law under which it could be registered except race law, because it's a condition you come into by birth. In terms of all of the bodily renditions of things we’ve been discussing, the important thing is that it has to be seen as something that you can’t get rid of; that it's in you ‘naturally’ and that's what makes possible the supremacism, the violence.

John: I'll say no. The kind of dynamics that Kit was pointing out – contamination, pollution, ideology – are indeed core to racist thinking and that doesn't need the articulation of whiteness. Going back to Rwanda – Hutus and Tutsis – it's a categorical identity that they were able to see complete physical differences in each other that were ineradicable. It's a function of colonialism, certainly, but what emerged was an absolutely terrible capacity to other that didn't require whiteness per se.

Pete: Antisemitism is a pretty clear example, although even then it depends on how you define whiteness because a Jew wouldn't necessarily be white in terms of the raciology of the late nineteenth century. There are other examples, e.g. the Japanese empire where they had racist views and practiced racist exclusions of people they identified as other. My own understanding of racism does tie it quite clearly to European colonisation of other areas of the world. That's where racism and ideas about race were born. So that does link it quite strongly to whiteness, but it has since been elaborated in different kinds of ways where you don't always have to have the figure of the white person actually there. But I think it's always there as an absent presence in some way.

Pnina: There are all kinds of cognate terms like xenophobia, communalism, casteism, ethnic violence. In Israel people say to me, ‘Well we are all semitic, how can we be racist against Arabs? We're from the same race.’ That doesn't hold for me when you find there is domination and violation where one group is clearly in control. Then it does seem to me that the kind of violations that are perpetuated on the other become racist. But I accept what Pete says, that there is a sort of model that comes from relations of colonialism in the first place.

Jeanette Edwards (Manchester): I have a question for the opposition and one for the proposition. Opposition first. It seems to me, as Pete started off, that many of our GDAT debates hinge on what looks to be the least important of the words in the motion. What you've argued, partly, is that violence and violation are not at the heart of racism but what you've not denied is that racism entails violence and violation. So if those words ‘are at the heart of,’ were changed to ‘integral to’, ‘imbricated in’, ‘implicated in’, would you have supported the motion?

For the proposition, both Kit and Pnina opened up the possibility of hopeful futures. Kit through the notion of choice, and Pnina with notions of multiculturalism. Can you see multiculturalism as similar to the benign convivialities that Pete was talking about. That, in fact, multiculturalism, like the benign convivialities, is actually the other side of the coin of racism.

Pete: You can't deny that racism involves violence. Of course it does. But is that all it involves? Can we get a complete understanding of the phenomenon by only looking at violence? I think you can't.

Pnina: I think it is at the heart. Is ethnocentrism racism? There are people who would say it is. Is nationalism racism? Some people would say it is. While I don't want to make either claim, I think it's normal to think that your own culture is better, that your own country is better. But that in a much more self-conscious, pedagogical way, multiculturalism teaches people that they can't just have a naive ethnocentrism that easily descends into racism. It teaches them that they have to respect others. Whether this leads to conviviality is a question of circumstances because not everybody lives in neighbourhoods which have that possibility. It helps to have conviviality, to know people from another culture, to be able to interact with them. But in ideological terms, you need to be able to say to people, ‘look you might think that your culture is better but other cultures are equally good in their own terms’. When I started to work on issues to do with racism, violence didn't appear in the literature. It did in the newspapers or on TV, but when people were theorising racism they didn't talk about violence and violation, and they didn't talk about the experiences of victims. That's what alerted me to the fact there was a missing element in all these critical race theories.

Kit: I don't think that conviviality and multiculturalism are inconsistent. And that goes back to the point I made, but did not develop, about purism. When I think, for example, about the violence in Northern Ireland, one of the points made was that some of the worst violence started initially in neighbourhoods that had been previously integrated of Protestants and Catholics together. And so if we are going to make multiculturalism productive in the longer term, we have to constantly be aware of and vigilant about the things that advance the rise of a purism which can undo all of the emergent neighbourly bonds. I think that's the other reason why things like segregation are very useful for those who are racist or purist. If people live together and have allotments together and maybe share food together or, as in Israel before things became so wildly separated, worship at the same shrine and things like that, the next thing you know they're chatting and exchanging recipes, or inviting people around and it mitigates these hard lines, and can come to make them seem arbitrary, unjust, nonsensical. The prospect of more important or consequential social mixing growing out of these small acts of empathy is threatening to ideologies of purism. In the States in terms of the political process, the divide between white and black was crucially important for constituting a melting pot among white ethnic communities that had been regarded as different, many as lesser. If you were Protestant English you were at the top. But if you were Italian, German, Jewish, Irish then you were not quite white enough. And the concept of the Caucasian enabled you to be assimilated both as a worker and as a political participant because you could exclude a whole category of other people, Native Americans and African Americans, who were socially excluded from the beginning. So if we look at the machine and what the machine produces, it is the illusion on the part of poor whites that they are better, that they are okay, and that they have something to protect rather than seeing themselves in the broader context. They don't see the machine. They see the fleshy outside and they misidentify it. As Lyndon B Johnson said, ‘If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best coloured man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.’ That's the violence, but it is on both sides; the perpetrators are violated as well.

Vlad Schuler Costa (Manchester): Can racism can be a generalised phenomena? There have been hints that racism may work differently in America to in parts of Latin America. Is there a racism and every minor racism is an epiphenomenon of it, or are there actually different phenomena all through the world?

Pete: That's a typical definitional question, isn't it? When you have varied phenomena, what are the common factors and what’s the variety? If you talk about common factors, you are denying the variety and if you emphasise variety then you don't get what makes them somehow similar. My own approach is that there is a whole bunch of phenomena in the world, and as analysts we have to carve out particular domains and the way we do that ultimately is slightly arbitrary. Obviously we don't want this to be completely arbitrary because it is pointless. But it's slightly arbitrary. So at some point we have to just decide that for analytical purposes I'm going to define this particular domain in this way for these reasons and see how far it gets me.

The way that I think about racism and the concept of race is, as I said before, rooted strongly in the history of European colonialism. It's got anterior roots in the Iberian peninsula and draws on some of the ideas about breeding, particularly horse breeding and so on, that John was referring to, and then that was transferred to the exclusion of Jews or people of Jewish descents and moros or people of Muslim descent and so on. That's where the word raza first emerges. As applied to human beings it was conceived as a kind of lineage, not as a group of people, but as something that you inherited. Those kinds of ideas were then transferred into the Americas by European conquerors and that's where the whole race complex really emerged. Now there are other kinds of beliefs that are similar in many ways. The way the ancient Chinese thought about people who were non-Chinese was very naturalising, looked at their bodies, saw them as inferior, linked their bodies to their geographies etc. Is that racism? Well, in some ways it is. It’s got the formal characteristics of many aspects of racism but I prefer to retain the idea of race linked to that particular history of European colonialism. That, for me, is what gives it the root, and the categories that emerged in that history, white, black, indigenous, Asian etc. are the key racial categories. And then where you see those categories emerging even if there isn't a discourse about biology, then that's still classed as race and racism in my book. There is a kind of common core but obviously there is a huge amount of variety. Anti-Semetism started from the sixth, seventh, eighth centuries right to the Medieval period when there was growth in anti-Semitism. For me it is not about race at that stage, but in the nineteenth century anti-Semitism in France and Germany elaborates and violently expresses ideas of race and racism that emerged from a colonial history, applying them to a non-colonised population. That for me counts as racism.

Pnina: There is an interesting discussion in American Ethnologist (2008) on Islamophobia and anti-Semitism and the argument was that Islamophobia has replaced or displaced anti-Semitism. In other words, the same sorts of attacks and definitions, images and so on, are now applied to Muslims. The idea was that in a particular moment in European history, the Jews were very threatening to the nation state, you’ve got Baumann’s argument about the holocaust. So the purity of the nation state was threatened by the Jews, now the threat is from Islam to the whole of Europe. These fears, or what I call folk devils, have some unique features but they all rest on a sense that these people are alien and they don't disappear entirely and vanish. These kinds of commonalities exist across these differences and in that way we know racism when we see it.

Soumhya: Incidentally one of the early debating motions that we eventually rejected was ‘we know racism when we see it’!

John: I'm ambivalent here. I'll say first that I'm working at articulating pre-modern notions of race. I would lean toward seeing racism as active prior to that. So the way the Francs set out to slaughter the Saxons. That was probably racial thinking – there was racism or some form of it in a very pre-modern sense. When I go to define racism, I lean towards Pnina's characterisations: This sense of contamination. I think that there is something prior to a notion of purity. The idea of inheritance that Pete mentioned, how early can you see that? I'm basically arguing that when you see the domestication of species long before we have a conceptualisation of genetics or inheritance, well that's racial thinking. The ability to subordinate domestic species, to labour, is perhaps the predicate for slavery as we see it in the Babylonian era and in the early states. Is racism there? Probably.

Kit: This is an interesting question, and it's part of the reason I'm looking at the machinery. And it's really interesting, John, you should mention antiquity because in my many wanderings, trying to sort this thing out, I ended up reading sections of Julius Caesar's descriptions of the Gallic Wars. He's talking about Celts and Germans and Celtic cultures and the ways he describes people are in every bit as degrading and demeaning as anything we might read and that's of course absolutely essential if you’re establishing an empire and dispossessing people of all their things. You can't do that unless they are defined as a form of human animal- as a barbarian or a savage. Once you put a person in that position you have to make them seem to be deserving of that condition because otherwise you cannot keep subordinating them because you know that you yourself you would not like it. So you are bent on denying that knowledge by making them extremely other. Pete makes a very specific point of origin that comes out of a particular history in order to make his set of transformations work properly and I think that's fine. It's just limited, and what we need is a broader system that then allows us to see that there is not only Islamophobia, but fundamentalisms of all sorts; religious fundamentalism, things that derive from the same mechanism of supremacism and purism driving a kind of sense of threat and the determination, as Pnina has said, to eliminate the problem by containing or exterminating the threat.

David Gellner (Oxford): When I first saw the motion I thought this was going to be about the definition of violence and whether we counted structural violences as violence or not. Now it seems like actually the key term is racism and whether we accept that as a universal or not. Dumont famously argued that the situation in the United States was not caste because it was animated by an ideal of equality and the absolute necessity to deny Blacks’ equality. I was at a conference in July in Bangalore where the government of Karnataka flew over Martin Luther King's son to address the massed ranks of the Congress party there and it was pretty impressive. There were at least a dozen Black academics from the United States and from Africa, who were absolutely sure that the way Dalits are treated in South Asia is exactly the same as the way black people are treated in North America. Personally, I must say, in relation to the issue of Dalits in this country, I find it astonishing that their claims are not accepted as falling under the Race Relations Act. It is absolutely clear that the kind of discrimination they face is exactly the same as the kind of discrimination of other people who are accepted to fall under it and their struggles and resistance to that can only be politically motivated and has to be understood in terms of diaspora politics and so on. My first question to all the panelists: May be racism is the problematic term, so what if we replace racism with ethnic closure? Does the argument still work there, and is it generalisable throughout the world? Second question: What about, and this is sort of backing up Pete's argument, pre-modern cases where you have communities living together for hundreds of years, say under the Ottoman Empire or in lots of places in Asia we've got living pre-modern multiculturalism. These are often very hierarchical and people can be friends and they may have blood kinship with each other and yet they still hold, what in modern terms, we call racist ideas and yet they live together. So are we going to say that violence and violation are part of that kind of actually existing pre-nationalist conviviality?

Pnina: Dumont’s argument, if I am remembering it correctly, was not just that there was a contrast. Rather, because the value of equality was so dominant in the US, black people who were not equal, visibly not equal, were therefore the subject of discrimination and violence. In other words, it worked differently from India where there was pluralism, and that was accepted, then the whole system worked without violence. So the violence in the US was precisely, maybe you said this earlier in a different way Pete, because there was an assumption of egalitarianism. And I think that where there is pluralism and inequality, that's not racism. That's just pluralism but with a division of labour and niches and inequality and so on. The Ottoman empire was probably racist by today's standard because only certain people could rule. For example, Jews could not rule. But no Jew ever thought that they could rule. It is a good question and I am not sure how to answer it, but certainly when there is an assumption of equality and there is inequality and it's violently upheld, then that is racism.

Pete: We're all talking about the same kind of phenomena when we're talking about differences between groups of people which might be thought of in terms of biology, culture, where they live, what they do, what kinds of people they are. Let’s take gender: That is another category where there is naturalisation, categorisation, othering, extreme violence, in many cases. We would definitely not want to include gender violence and gender discrimination as a form of racism in some way. Similarly, if you think about class you can find all the kinds of historical instances where working classes or lower classes and upper classes are talked about in highly naturalising terms, and in terms of inherited difference and so forth. Do we want to include that under racism? Well, we could do, maybe, because often race and class are very closely related but then this not always the case. If we broaden racism to include all these different things, in my view, then it loses its analytic coherence and utility. At some point, as social scientists, we're going to have to say: ‘Okay, here there is a bunch of phenomenon which seem to be somehow related to each other, what are the differences? How do we classify these different phenomena into different kinds of analytical categories in ways that they are useful? ’ For me, racism has a particular set of characteristics and I link that to its particular history of conquest of European conquest.

Kit: I would say the opposite. If we think of the drive of our disciplinary process – the move to looking at the social constitution of things, there is a thing that for the moment we are calling racism. But, these things are all fluid. Take certain kinds of vigilantism against women who want to marry the ‘wrong kind of person’. There is an intersection between race and gender here that is absolutely unavoidable. If we tighten our analytical categories too much, we miss both the way the whole machine operates and where it's going to go. We only study where it has been in order to understand where it's going to go next because it will go somewhere and we need to be there first as anthropologists.

Pete: But I'm not talking about intersections. Of course race and gender intersect. But vigilantism has been practiced against women as a category without anything to do with race. Just because women are the subjects of vigilantism – controlling their behaviour, their chastity, their honour and they get punished, beaten up or raped because they step over the line – does that make them a racial category? I don’t think so.

In my view, racism always involves sexism, but sexism does not always involve racism. You can think of scenarios where sexist violence occurs which isn’t racialised. But it’s extremely hard to think of scenarios where racialised violence occurs that isn’t sexualised or sexist at the same time.

John: I want to respond to the question about the state and living together. One understanding of the traditional state is that they didn't care what language you spoke or who you married, as long as you paid taxes. This meant that people could coexist. The modern state, in contrast cares about all of that. Arguably, and to get back to Foucault, we see racial thinking at the level of the state with biopolitics and the concept of population, with certain kinds of medical surveillance and intervention. While that's not necessarily predicated on an idea of racism, I'm increasingly swayed by Pete's saying that maybe racism is modern but I think racial thinking is very pre-modern.

Penny Harvey (Manchester): I think you're doing quite well at trying to keep the two sides apart. Now I'm going to try collapsing them. I was quite taken by Pete's arguments that violence is necessary but insufficient, that racism exists by virtue of the promise of equality and the whole relationship between conviviality and violence.

My first question was to Kit. You had that great point that human beings have to protect themselves from empathy because they are basically predatory creatures. Isn’t your focus on the relationship between empathy and predation basically the same argument as Pete’s – just that yours is at the human scale and Pete’s at the historical?

But, Pete, you end up with the problem that you then have colonial slavery is racist and classical slavery isn’t. This requires a kind of break that's quite hard to defend.

Finally, I wanted to ask Pnina and John to also think about pre-modern racism. I kept thinking of the sixteenth century images of when Spaniards first arrived in South America and they have this fantastic description of the pre-modern races. The images were really amazing because they showed white figures, but they were distorted: People who walked backwards, people who had only one humongous foot, people who had eyes in the middle of their chest. It seems that in those early images there was a kind of fear, but there was also an incredible sense of curiosity. It would be worth thinking about that.

Pete: There is a vast debate about whether classical slavery was racist or not which I'm not going to rehearse here. I don't think that’s particularly hard to defend because I think there is enough evidence that it wasn't the same as Transatlantic modern slavery or even the kind of Medieval Arab slavery which is often part of the history of racialisation. I think there is enough evidence about classical slavery to show that it was qualitatively different from either North African Arab slavery or much more so Transatlantic modern slavery.

Kit: People used to discuss that a lot in the late 50s and 60s in terms of being able to understand the inherited condition of being descended from slaves and what slavery meant. And it was in many cases obviously not opposed to intimacy because where did all those mixed race children come from? And if you read slaves’ accounts and histories, you see that people were living in the same households and that sometimes people owned their cousins or their children. So we can't say that there was absolutely nothing that was hospitable or convivial in the system as it existed historically, but it was clearly established by a kind of violent supremacism. Anything that allows one human being to own the body of another and makes that other person classified as some kind of possession or animal is violent. There is just no other word for that.

Racism exists in a condition of supremacy and entitlement over the lives of others and the bodily persons of others. In the United States, the promise of equality was encoded in the constitution, but it was not intended to include people of African descent or Native Americans. Equality was among white people. It was not meant to include those others. Racism was made visible in certain ways by the struggle for equality. But it was always there. I'm saying pick this as a model, look at this as a machine. The beauty of the United States as a crucible for this particular discussion is that it's got every single element of endemic racism and racial supremacism, with each operating in its own way but with all still functioning as an ensemble and you pick it apart and then you can begin to see how it works on every part of the population and then see how it also works elsewhere.

Pnina: I'll say something very short about monstrosities. The explorers' vision of various monstrosities that they encountered is quite different from a sense of ‘us’ and ‘them’ where we feel threatened by some other. And that has to do with racism. But seeing strange beings as you go on your travels have nothing to do with the kind of racism that we are talking about.

John: Penny, you underscore the point that I'm trying to make. Yes, racial thinking is far broader than just fear and it involves curiosity and intrigue and fascination.

Dick Werbner (Manchester): The point that Pete is compelling us to think about is: Can you clap with one hand alone? If you focus on only one part of a phenomenon, you'll get it out of perspective. How do we go about analysing something which has so many connections to something else? Well, I accept that this is a very powerful argument and I wish I could be convinced. The difficulty that I have with it is that there comes a point when you have to say what really takes priority, what is at the heart of the matter. Unfortunately the more I listen to Pete, the more I became convinced that he really agrees with the other side: That the heart of the matter really has to do with something which emerged in colonialism.

Nayanika Mukherjee (Durham): I wanted to ask a question to all the panelists about the idea of the non-human human as foundational to racism. It’s been touched upon briefly. My bigger question is how do we avoid diluting the violence of racism by trying to understand structural inequalities which lead to racism. I am reflecting on some of the discussions about whiteness that have emerged after Brexit or after Trump where whiteness has become a way of whitewashing issues about racism.

John: When I started engaging in race scholarship the question was entirely focused on de-humanisation and rendering other humans not-human. But looking at the history of race, raza in particular, that this idea is articulated by aristocrats through their hunting dogs and their horses by seeing forms of equivalence between themselves and these non-humans: They are valourous in the hunt and so we are valorous too. This was part of making a series of claims for a genealogy of power and, I think, very importantly, that’s racial thinking. It does not involve de-humanisation, rather saying we are the same as these non-humans.

Kit: If we are talking about liberal democracy and the emergence of egalitarianism, what we see historically and certainly in Anglophone countries is precisely the idea emerging from the Medieval period in which aristocrats were regarded as a race apart. The transformation is from a race of aristocrats to an aristocratic race. If you look historically at the expansion of the franchise in Britain, for example, you’ll see that one of the things they did in order to study how it would work was to go to Canada and South Africa and places where white people who had not been allowed to vote in Britain were allowed to brand themselves as self-governing republics, and on that basis came back with the reassurance that an aristocratic race was capable of self-governance. There literally is a line that you can trace around this shift from aristocracy as bound in biology rather than in pedigree and genealogy. In some ways there’s a possibility for a way out through that same door that we came in by, but I don’t know.

John: Just a quick note, in the colonial US whiteness was restricted to property owners. White as a category gets formulated after Bacon’s rebellion when they’re going to shift from indentured servitude more towards slavery.

Pnina: I’m just going to say something about this relationship between structural exclusion and violent enactments of racist sentiment. I think it does vary from country to country. When I first used to attend conferences in Europe, most Europeans would not want to use the word racism for structural exclusion. Racism was associated with the Holocaust, with all kinds of theories of race which were much more violent and much more scary and historically potent, than something like discriminating against some kinds of people in jobs. I have seen Europeans actively object to the use of the word racism for things that, in Britain and America, are acceptable to name as racism. I am wondering if the use of the word racism is much more common in Europe than it used to be or whether it is still linked to neo-Nazi movements.

Christian [last name not given] (Manchester Metropolitan University): My question would be to John in the first instance, but I would be very keen to also hear the opinion of other panel members. I was intrigued by your point about racism being at the heart of care practices. I would like to ask if you talk about care as primarily a reproductive/racial practice as in good breeding, or do you think about care as a boundary process of forming communities and kinship, or do you think about care in a kind of bio-political sense which could be elaborated through the work of Michel Foucault as. I was just wondering if you could specify your ideas a bit and maybe what others think about care and racism and that kind of connection.

John: I mostly worked through the bio-political sense of care, but the more time that I spend on it I get closer towards that second and first definitions that you articulated. Obviously, they’re so fundamental to constituting community, they are the basis of establishing belonging and the principle about it is what distinguishes us as a species. It really becomes prior to so much that follows from it.

Ed [last name not given]: I don’t have an affiliation to a university. I’m just here for the open day and for this debate today. Kit spoke about racism as a conscious or semi-conscious choice that people make in thinking or behaving racially – whether that’s a group of vigilantes or the lone psychic violator who is acting in a racist way or the agent or cog inside the machinery of structural oppression. I think this is interesting when you pose it, in particular, alongside the topic of Dylann Roof, and how digital media is this new and widely adopted form of material culture where you have large Twitter forums producing polarising race relation through these really raced accounts. My question is can you then consider, based on this information, weaponised algorithms or artificial intelligence to be considered violent or violatory at their heart, when A) they’re not human, and B) they’re not making a conscious or semi-conscious decision to act violently, or are violatory or racist in themselves because the same parameters of morality don’t extend to them? Seeing as how big data is really affecting our lives and some people would say reducing the level of autonomy and experience, and how at some point in the future, artificial intelligence and robots maybe are races in themselves that anthropologists study, can AI be racist?

Kit: Technically speaking there are two elements. One is that artificial intelligence and these robots are entities that are created by human beings to amplify their intentions for whatever reason. It’s a bit like a machine gun, it just shoots faster but it doesn’t necessarily change the agency behind it, which is that of human beings. Now, the other part of it is, of course, that these robots and these entities have also been programmed to learn and to modify their behaviour on the basis of how we respond. So indeed we become the environment to which they increasingly adapt and one of my concerns is that we are held in a state of constancy. We get more and more of the same kind of thing and less and less of the things that actually combine conviviality, with the possibility of choosing to be outside your own prejudices.

Pete: I think this is a very interesting question because it also gets to the idea of agency. Where is the agency in these things? They’ve been designed by humans and they’re designed to have a certain level of agency themselves. There isn’t a clear distinction between human and non-human agency here. I’m quite keen on the idea of the unforeseen consequences because part of the way that structural racism operates is by creating environments in which people behave in certain ways. They’re not necessarily thinking of excluding someone else, or being violent or racist, they’re just living their lives. Yet the collective effects of their actions in the longer term can be to exclude certain categories of people. That’s the same kind of mechanism as the AI or the algorithm that is created in a certain way and then let out into the world to run and has racist effects, even if it wasn’t actually designed in that way to start with.

Ruth Sullivan (University of Manchester): My question actually follows quite nicely on that one and I was just wondering if violence and violation is at the heart of racism now, do you think that given the changing structures of the social world, it will remain that way and if not it will be harder to identify and confront.

Pete: Well, I do not think that it is at the heart so I can’t respond.

Kit: I think that it will always be there. I think that we will always be able to recognise it because the people who are on the business end of it will be telling us about it and they will be making a case and we’ll need to be attentive. I think it’s important that when people are speaking grandly and in a promising way about the future we have to consider going back to the idea of liberal democracies as an unending project. Liberal democracies rely on consensus and voluntarism for many things, and that is exactly where people are challenged if they wish to restrict or exclude or confine other people. A kind of cheerful pessimism is really helpful: It’s always going to be there but can we manage to make it something that we disapprove of broadly?

John: Yes, similarly, I think racial thinking will continue to be creative and elaborated and we have to find the kind of stance that Kit is talking about. Racial thinking won’t always be clear through violence.

Ximena Altamirano (Manchester): Pete, you raised the issue of Latin America where it’s a multicultural environment where people are proud of the heritage but with Kit raising the difference between colour and race. I was wondering if inequalities in Latin America would be better classified as colourism instead of racism and if that would explain the lack of blatant violence or violation.

Pete: I don’t think for a second that there isn’t blatant and rampant racial violence in Latin America. It coexists with conviviality, that’s the point. But you just have look at the police harassment of black people in Brazil, racist violence in Guatemala, in Bolivia etc. or against indigenous people in Brazil. And it’s not better there than it is anywhere else in terms of violence. So, I do think that the word racism is appropriate for the Latin American context. You could qualify it as colourism, people have tried to interpret it in that way – that racism operates by gradations of colour. The skin tone, the actual colour of your skin, has been shown to make a significant difference to your life chances. Rather than whether you are black or white, how black or how brown are you statistically links up to education and all kinds of other things. This is the case in the States as well.

Guilherme Fians (Manchester): I was thinking about bureaucratic forms here in the UK. There’s always a question about ethnic background and one of the boxes we can tick is White British, and when they establish this category of White British they are linking nationality and ethnicity, or race. And relatedly, when we are thinking about discrimination against refugees here in the UK for example, usually people have in mind this idea that these people don’t belong to this place. So would you say that racism and discrimination in general are necessarily related to geographical origins?

John: I’m thinking of the category of Caucasian and this theory about whiteness, that Blumenbach articulated in the late 1700s. By the late 1800s with ethno-nationalism in Europe, the 26 or so races of Europe had very easily ratified around what were emerging as national boundaries and nobody wanted to talk about Caucasians or whiteness any more. That idea was gone and it was replaced by Teutonic, Saxon, Mediterranean, Nordic and so on. There are some very strong arguments that World War One and World War Two were ethnic wars basically, where this visceral sense of hatred involved racial components. It’s bizarre that now we’re back to talking about whiteness again. So, yes, it scales very easily through a pre-national and then a national version and then post-national, perhaps.

Pnina: I think that in Britain the census, for example, that asks an ethnic question and now a religious question is a progressive project to discover if there is discrimination amongst some groups rather than others. It’s not intended to be racialised. It’s intended to be linked to policies. In places like France they’ve never had a census which has an ethnic question and therefore they don't know what’s going on in terms of structural racism. I think that one has to accept the fact that the British actually, more than the Americans even, have had a very progressive race relations policy in relation to finding out where discrimination lies.

Soumhya: It sounds like you are saying that progressive racialisation is not racism.

Pnina: Yes. It is not at all.

Kit: If you look historically there has been a proliferation of categories from no categories at all. I was working on a paper about this issue in Britain in the 90s. Before the census of 1991, they did not ask about race or ethnicity. The place of origin – where one was born – was used as a proxy for race/ethnicity. In the census of 1991, when they asked about race, they discovered that many of the people that they had been counting as Indians because they were born in India, were actually white; similarly many of the people that were counted as South African. These were people who were coming back to Britain with the end of colonialism.

Douglas Holmes (Binghamton, SUNY): I am interested in the status of the poor white or what’s called in the US ‘white trash’. I spent most of my adult life living in Euston, Texas and would say that the most despised group by everyone by far are poor whites and much of the contempt and anger towards Bill Clinton was about that: His whiteness was causing an almost racial fury, so I just want to see what you have to say about white trash.

John: I have a lot to say and I wrote a book about it. Yes, I agree and to call it racism exactly shows how complicated and difficult this concept is. Yes it’s visceral. Yes, it’s absolutely a very intense kind of othering and my hesitancy around invoking atavism to talk about racism is exactly because poor whites are consistently seen as atavistic, in some primal prior state of humanity, and it’s very much about the incapacity to distinguish them from poor Blacks. In the South for instance, they share a way of speaking and food and activities that are not discernible by a clear colour line. That was surely the problem when those poor whites moved North to Detroit.

Pnina: In the most recent UK census, which hasn’t yet been officially published, it’s been shown that white boys who get school meals are well behind everybody else in reading. In other words, there is this category in Britain as well that is of deprived white kids and they are certainly a problem. What this census shows is that this is not entirely about race in a simple way; it is also about class if nothing else.

Kit: This is such a good category to bring up because, when I’m thinking about the psychic violation of racism, what it does is create a category of person. When you think conspiratorially in the States, if you have the capacity to speak in terms of economic things or to establish shared interests across racial lines you’re far more likely to be done away with, than if you speak within competing groups for entitlements because that works politically very effectively. That’s one of the things that’s a concern about artificial intelligence, when people within those communities actually do reach out or go online or try to find out more information, they begin thinking of themselves as a class for itself as well as in itself. What they find is stuff that reinforces the isolation rather than things that actually show that there’s a sort of shared suffering, a shared kind of economic deprivation that could be overcome. I always think that it’s crucial to include, as you were saying Pnina, poor white people. Thinking about the comparatively privileged positions of having a very heavily articulated egalitarian movement that is focused around visible blackness, the category of the poor white is unmarked and it’s taken for granted. It needs to be included not only because excluding it causes resentment, but also because it’s unjust to exclude their suffering. It should be and also and not either/or.

John: In the US, there’s a difference in life expectancy between Whites and Blacks of about five years. Life expectancy overall is improving pretty consistently, but you still see that racial difference. Over the last decade, the only group that now is seeing a declining life expectancy is whites without a college education. This makes it very difficult to talk about racism in this very straight forward way as we have been doing in terms of life expectancy when you see a group that is counter to the overall increase: for African Americans it is increasing, for Latinos it is as well, for this group of whites is actually decreasing.

Douglas Holmes: The size of the group is also something that we don’t take seriously. It is probably the poorest segment of the poor population in the US.

Kit: And they are also the people whom you racialise in social welfare discussions A) they might join in, B) they’re also hidden because they’re also recipients and they do need support and it’s made that vulnerability a source of shame, instead of being a source of national shame and it becomes personal shame.

Chima Anyadike-Danes, (University of California, Irvine): I was thinking particularly about the way in which Pete has talked about Latin America and the conviviality around enracement. Obviously you’re talking about a linguistic cultural scale as opposed to a national scale. I’m wondering if, in the context of the US, talking about a national scale in terms of race obscures as much as it reveals because of the various regionalised histories of colonialism. To talk about the binary white/black on the West coast doesn’t make very much sense, it doesn’t make sense for Hawaii, and the various ways in which these histories of colonialism were effectuated by the Russians, the Spanish etc. So I wonder if that culture of conviviality argument might be useful for thinking about, for example, the Spanish colonisation of what became the West in the US and thinking through racism in that context?

Pete: I don’t study the USA, but yes, of course, the black/white binary which has been so powerful in the imagination of race in the States, and in the analysis of race in the States by social science, finds it pretty hard to get to grips with the presence of Latinos and the growing presence of Asians. So, yes, there’s been an increased awareness among social scientists in the US that the black/white binary isn’t working anymore and there’s a whole examination of what they call the ‘browning’ of the USA, and an emphasis on multi-racialism and the kind of hidden histories of race mixture in the US that have been submerged under the black/white binary etc. I don’t think we need to think about the relation of conviviality and violence only in specific regional situations. My argument was broader: That whenever you see violence you also always have to think about the possibility of conviviality or what violence is constructed against. I like Dick Werbner’s idea of the one hand clapping. Whether one wants to think about Latinos and Asians as somehow encapsulating a particular form of racial conviviality, I’m not so sure, because then you can say well they’re also the subjects of violence, so my idea is that the relation between violence and non-violence is pervasive. You find it in any situation not only in some particular regional conjunctures.

Kit: I think there’s also a kind of conviviality within racism because there’s social solidarity in a social context that is created. Unless we take seriously our simplicity as human beings, we take comfort in all kinds of proximities that might not be available to us otherwise, we’re not thinking with kindness about the undoing of this hostile attitude. We have to look at what it also provides for people and take other human beings seriously. We can’t just be reductive because people have ideas that are repugnant to us, we have to look at what the role of those ideas perform in their lives.

Pnina: I have to say that I think entirely differently from Pete, because I think that racism is performative. It makes a statement. It’s symbolic and an attempt to hit at and break conviviality. Conviviality may be there, but the racists want to stop it. They do that by violence, which leads to counter violence which leads to revenge and so on… The polarisation that’s created through racism is anti-convivial. If I look at places like Israel and the way Arabs are treated, certainly there’s a movement to defend human rights and citizens’ rights, but the aim of the racists is to break through that conviviality, to stop it. So, I think we can’t underestimate the force of the performative violence. To me, that’s a very important aspect of the violence – it creates a cycle of revenge, and by the end of it people who were friends are killing each other.

Summing up

The vote

For the motion: 29

Against the motion: 27

Abstain: 4

The motion ‘Violence and Violation are at the heart of racism’ is upheld.