Abstract
Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider is an ambitious book, setting out to analyse working class efforts to secure social and economic justice from the time of the industrial revolution through to the era of black self-organization in the late 1980s. What differs from other accounts is that it uses an analytical lens of race and the effect that racial discourse and racism have had on the ability of working class people to collectivize for social justice and equality. Satnam Virdee’s book builds on some of the classic accounts of black and Asian people in Britain (Fryer, 1984; Ramdin, 1987; Visram, 2002). Yet while these excellent books provide invaluable accounts of the experiences of black people in contributing to life in Britain, Virdee’s book is different. His interest lies in the racial formation of different groups within society at different periods of history and how leaders from minority ethnic groups played key roles in working class struggles. Also, in this account, racism moves beyond that of colour ‘to bring into view other modalities of racism that have been much neglected in sociology, including most notably anti-Irish Catholic racism and anti-Semitism’ (p. 3).
The book puts forward three main arguments, firstly that racism can be traced back to the early 19th century when the British nation was constructed such that there were citizens who were insiders and others who were considered ‘outsiders’ – in particular, racialized outsiders like the Irish Catholics, Jews, Asians and people of African and Caribbean descent. Secondly, despite this racialization, there were many events during the period under study when working class people of all backgrounds came together to reject racism and racialized discourses. The third argument is that socialist leaders within the working class, particularly those advancing internationalist arguments and rejecting narrow nationalist perspectives, were able to overcome the divisive effects of racism at key historical moments.
The author argues that ‘reading the history of the working class in England against the grain helps to make more transparent the influential contributions made by individuals from different ethnic groups in the formative struggles for economic and social justice’ (p. 7). Virdee begins by recounting the role of the Irish Catholic worker in working class struggles. As increasing numbers moved to England to work on farms and in newly industrializing towns, by the mid-1800s over 700,000 had arrived, having been forced off the land by the famine that saw a million people starve to death. Despite the crude racism that depicted the Irish as sub-human creatures and an ‘inferior race that didn’t belong in England’ (p. 36) it was Irish immigrants and people of Irish descent who were central to the development of new unionism, which led to large numbers of workers joining unions for the first time. Similarly, Virdee notes how many conventional labour histories have also left out the significant role of Jewish workers in the formation of new unionism, many of whom had settled in the East End of London having escaped from pogroms in Eastern Europe.
The chapters progress from these early periods of inter-racial working class solidarity to cover the period of militancy around the First World War, detailing the outbreaks of vicious racism from the white working class towards black workers, particularly around the docks where riots took place against black seamen in 1919. The chapter ‘From welfare settlement to Enoch Powell’ takes us through the development of organized anti-racism, addressing the trade union movement’s opposition to immigration and the colour bar operated by trade unions at places like Ford and Tate and Lyle. Other chapters cover notable events such as the strike led by Asian women at Grunwick in the mid-1970s and the formation of the Anti-Nazi League in response to the growing influence of the right wing National Front.
Overall this book is impressive. It is written in an engaging and accessible way and manages to convey its argument that English working class history cannot be fully understood without the lens of race to interrogate key events. This is a book that I would recommend to labour studies students for a different take on the working class history of the labour movement, but also to students of sociology and race in order that they develop a more nuanced understanding of the process of racialization through some of the key events of English working class struggles.