Whiteness in Britain.
Magic mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all? — Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
“Is this car yours?” “Why do you have £200 pounds on you?” “Your dress code isn’t like the people of this area, I hope you don’t mind but we’d like to search you.” “Can you account for why you’re here? (walking on the street).” “You fit the description of being black and wearing a jumper.”
These are a handful of quotes from the countless times I’ve been stopped and searched, often illegally, by Metropolitan police. I’ve known very few moments in my life as a British citizen where I haven’t been racially profiled, both socially and institutionally. Black bodies are 28 times more likely to be stopped and searched than white ones.
De Gobineau, one of the vast numbers of thinkers who contributed to the field of scientific racism during the Enlightenment, drew up the precursors to modern racial profiling, ideas that persevered until the 1960s becoming institutionalised behavioural mindsets. Although the more raw and overt stereotyping and prejudice have diminished over time, the underlying belief in them has thrived in the media, government and general attitudes. What trends have these social stereotypes manifested in British society? For one, far too many ethnic minorities, such as black, travellers of Irish heritage, gypsy/Roma, mixed heritage, Bangladeshi and Pakistani pupils, are underachieving in British schools — why?
British society is rife with racial profiling. De Gobineau, like many of his time and since, set out to classify race distinction: for example, how yellow people are timid and black people are animalistic. These profiles are passively prominent in modern mainstream media/politics and carry through into the classroom, creating self-fulfilling prophecies; as the Macpherson report detailed, we are exercising “unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racial stereotyping”. A study by the LSE on institutional racism and ethnic inequalities (2010) showed how “educational practices, such as setting, coaching and examination tiering (have) cumulatively disadvantage black pupils” who are then “more likely to be entered into the Foundation tier for maths and English compared with their white counterparts.”
Education is also, of course, the underpinning element of social mobility, for which the UK fares the worst in the developed world. A report released in 2014 by the Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity shows how “a third of Pakistani and Bangladeshi groups in England and a fifth of its Black African, Black Caribbean, and Arab populations live in the country’s most deprived neighbourhoods compared with 8% of the white British population” and that even if “it’s clear that ethnic minorities in Britain are — in many cases — outperforming their white peers in both secondary and higher education, they will still not see these gains in education translated into employment outcomes.”
In 2009, then employment minister Jim Knight said that “(job) candidates with an Asian or African name face real discrimination”. Government-sponsored research, upon which he premised what he said, showed that “an applicant who appeared to be white would send nine applications before receiving a positive response or either an invitation to an interview”, whereas, “minority candidates with the same qualifications and experience had to send 16 applications before receiving a similar response.” What does this say about white privilege?
Following the traditions of Peggy McIintosh’s essay White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, we can safely say that white privilege in 2015 UK means (but is not limited to) being able to 1) send your kids to school being sure their educational success will not be hindered by their skin colour, 2) drive a nice car or walk in a wealthy neighbourhood without being fearful of being stopped by, or followed by, police and 3) apply for jobs and go to interviews knowing that your race and surname will not limit your application and chances. But of course as McIntosh’s infamous essay has shown us there are many other ways this privilege manifests, for example, “17) I can criticise our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behaviour without being seen as a cultural outsider” — a point whose existence I can strongly vouch for.
“One is born in a white country… when you open your eyes to the world, everything you see: none of it applies to you. You go to white movies and, like everybody else, you fall in love with Joan Crawford, and you root for the Good Guys who are killing off the Indians. It comes as a great psychological collision when you realise all of these things are metaphors for your oppression, and will lead into a kind of psychological warfare in which you may perish.” — James Baldwin
The question one may very well be asking themselves at this point is, why? In order to understand white privilege, which itself stems from a longstanding tradition of white supremacy, we must travel back in European-American history. It was actually around the beginning of the era of the Enlightenment that “white” people came into existence. As Theodore Allen explains in his masterwork The Invention of the White Race, there is a “Great White Assumption” — “the unquestioning, indeed unthinking acceptance of the ‘white’ identity of European-Americans of all classes as a natural attribute rather than a social construct.” Race is a construct.
The construction of race serves a fundamental role in the maintenance of the social status quo inherent in the entire developed world. Scouring through several hundred years of American history, Allen found that it was only in the late 1800s that European-Americans began to self-define as “white”. With whiteness came the ultimate form of social control to be exercised by the “ruling class” — namely government and big business. It was directly after Bacon’s Rebellion that the wealthy masters of society decided to undermine worker solidarity by granting whites the privilege of being white; this concession created a buffer that broke solidarity until today.
“The hallmark, the informing principle, of racial oppression is the reduction of all members of the oppressed group to one undifferentiated social status, beneath that of any member of the oppressor group.” This observation made by Allen is why coloured Alabama parents from the late 19th century to early 21st century London parents have felt that, “the virtuous aspirations of our children must be continually checked by the knowledge that no matter how upright their conduct, they will be looked upon as less worthy of respect than the lowest wretch on earth who wears a white skin.”
White supremacy is a staple of the functionality of modern society. Scapegoating through difference, particularly in respects to race and religion, maintains social order, securing a buffer of false hatred between haves and have nots: the “beautiful gradation from the highest to the lowest, where the transitions all the way are almost imperceptible”, as Edmund Burke described it, which by the philosophy of government and big business is “indubitably, the security…of every nation”.
White privilege is simply being able to self-define as white and to direct your angst at people of colour, and ignorance of this privilege is currently one of the largest obstacles to a fair and equal society.
White privilege manifests via a long process of non-consensual administration that can be traced to the moment and circumstance of birth. This administration can be seen in two parts that constantly cross over both the initial administration and the self-administration. Initial administration starts where, as McIntosh highlights, parents can say: “I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not like them” or “My children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.” As McIntosh continues, these social reassurances created a mindset that she “was among those who could control the turf. My skin colour was an asset for any move I was educated to want to make. I could think of myself as belonging in major ways, and of making social systems work for me.”
Conversely, coloured children are subjected to the belief that whites have always maintained a cultural superiority over coloured bodies. The main principle of self-administration is found in Allen Johnson’s description of “the path of least resistance”, which is “to be aware of none of this, to accept the organisation of social life as just the way things are. This is especially true of dominant groups in systems of privilege, who can indulge in the ‘luxury of obliviousness’, the freedom to live unaware of what you’re participating in and how and with what effect.” As Jane Eliot’s blue eyes/brown eyes experiment demonstrated on Channel 4, we are a nation in grave denial. The initiative to engage in an honest national discussion of white privilege and institutional racism in the UK is always from the coloured community and has yet to be heeded.
“White-skin privileges may finally come to be seen and rejected by labouring-class European-Americans as the incubus that for three centuries has paralysed their will in defence of their class interests vis-à-vis those of the ruling class.” — Theodore W Allen
With the growing popularity of the extremist polish KNP linked to the UK Independence Party’s (UKIP) fascist stances on anti-immigration and anti-EU attitudes, there has been pressure on our current right-wing government to take more extremist measures, and take them they will. As former chair of the Commission for Racial Equality Trevor Phillips expressed: “If we want to avoid a slow descent into mutual bigotry, we need to drop the dogma, stop singing kumbaya to each other, weigh the evidence without sentiment, recognise the reality, and work out a programme — both symbolic and practical — to change the reality.”
The reality is that far from addressing the privileges inherent in whiteness, white people are feeling more emboldened by government and big business to act out their privilege and to blatantly express racism. A recent British Social Attitudes survey showed that the last decade has seen a steady rise to the point where 30% of the population say they harbour some racial prejudice. As the Guardian reported, LSE’s Dr Grace Lowden’s research of BSA statistics since the 1980s “has shown that the group that recorded the biggest rise was white, professional men between the ages of 35 and 64, highly educated and earning a lot of money.”
Britain is headed into a dangerous trend that could see a vicious communalism emerge. It is white privilege that emboldens so many to speak out against cultural outsiders and it is an unearned privilege to be able to “criticise our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behaviour without being seen as a cultural outsider”. As a dark-skinned person I increasingly face the glare of “problem” and of being undeserving of an opinion on topics like immigration. What is needed now more than ever is for UK society to no longer take the path of least resistance. There truly is no moment of greater responsiveness for anyone than when they choose to no longer be silent about their unearned privilege, and to instead show solidarity with those who no matter how much they change their circumstances will never possess white privilege.
Racialisation is something we fear in the UK, differences are something we try to ignore, but in doing so we ignore its systemic nature. ROTA blog published a few months ago: “For those of us from the white majority, anti-racism needs to be more than just about ‘valuing diversity’ and marching or campaigning against racism. It also needs to be about us working to unravel our own white privilege. It is also means starting to understand the connection between my everyday privilege and the institutional racism that both riddles British society and reinforces my own privilege”.
Sometimes changing the status quo can be as simple as stepping out of ignorance and into action. In 1960 it was the Greensboro sit-ins that turned the tide on racial prejudice when four young black students took affirmative action. Allen Johnson described it thus: “They did not speak, much less argue, with anyone, or hand out written statements. Instead, they made use of the fact that every social system happens only through the participation of individuals, any one of whom has the potential to change how the system happens by stepping off the path of least resistance.”
Co-existence is not just a possibility but the only sustainable option, and the only feasible path toward it is to hold an honest discussion of the playing field we currently occupy.
Joshua Virasami is a freelance writer and musician from London, UK. He can be followed at @joshuavirasami and Facebook.com/joshuavirasami.
Originally published at www.contributoria.com.
