How have certain types of crime been racialised in the United Kingdom? What are the colonial origins of institutional racism within the British police force? And how has whiteness been mobilised to divide different communities across Britain? Samira Shackle spoke with Adam Elliott-Cooper, sociologist at Greenwich University, whose book, Black Resistance to British Policing, was published in May this year.
A conversation on racism, identity and social movements in the United Kingdom that explores how common conceptions around the particular attributes of certain communities have developed.
Hosts: Alice Bloch and Samira Shackle
Exec Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Danosongs
Image artwork: Ed Dingli
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Transcript:
Samira Shackle:
Hi and welcome to With Reason. I'm Samira Shackle. And I'm Alice Bloch. And With Reason is brought to you from New Humanist magazine and The Rationalist Association. This podcast is where we catch up with people whose work and ideas challenged dogma and lazy thinking. It is the space to reflect on reason and unreason, debate and criticism.
Alice Bloch:
And something we've explored in every series of With Reason so far is racism and inequality, the reality of it and stories of resistance to it. Back in series one, Jason Arday told us all about growing up in the 90s and about the contradictions of the so called cool Britannia era. That was the decade in which the black teenager Stephen Lawrence was murdered, and in which the McPherson report concluded that the investigation into that killing had been marred by professional incompetence, institutional racism and a failure of leadership. More than two decades on from that report, despite some changes, racism and policing all too often appear in the same breath, something highlighted by the Black Lives Matter movements, both here and in the US. And indeed, elsewhere. Samira that's something you're discussing with your guest today, the sociologist Adam Elliott-Cooper. I'll leave it to you to tell us more about him. And I'll be back at the end for a catch up.
Samira Shackle:
Yeah, so Adam is a sociologist at Greenwich University. And in his new book, Black Resistance to British Policing, he looks at the activism that made things like Black Lives Matter as possible. But he also approaches racism as something that goes way beyond the interpersonal level. So this idea of one individual being racist and discriminatory against another. Instead, he argues that black resistance confronts an entire global system of racial classification and exploitation and violence. So it's a sobering read, it highlights the links between imperial cultures colonial war and contemporary racisms, plural. But it's also hopeful, but gets inspired by experience too. So before digging into that historical structural side of things, Adam told me first about how his time spent working with young people actually brought him to writing about policing and resistance in the first place.
Adam Elliott-Cooper:
So I guess the book begins in 2011. And in 2011, I was working as a youth worker in Hackney in northeast London, where a lot of the work we were doing with the young people, there was educational workshops, and things like that. But I was always really interested in the more social activities that we could do with the young people that could explore different kinds of social or political issues. Sometimes I was invited into a youth club and asked to do a workshop on how to deal with a stop and search or police misuse of power. But a lot of the conversations often extended to why the police operate in the way they do, what the history of policing is, what the wider context is, but sometimes will be put into one workshop in a school about the history in the context of policing. But a lot of the young people wanted to always know about, okay, but what can we practically do? How can I deal with when I'm being stopped and searched? How can I challenge misuse of police power. And so I began to realise that policing was this issue, which not only was something which a lot of young people engaged with, but it was simultaneously something which better enabled people to understand the existing social order, and the historical context in which it emerged, but also enabled people to come up with practical solutions to challenge the existing social order.
SS:
Interesting. So you said that was in 2011, which was also the year of the London riots 10 years ago. So those started in Tottenham, in the north of London, actually, where I live. And I think the way that's been sort of cemented in the national memory is a story of looting and disorder and mayhem. And this idea, I think, particularly of local communities really losing out from a kind of rampage of looting. But that's not how you see it, is it?
AEC:
No, I think that because of this experience I had with working on these issues relating to policing of all of these young people, I kind of saw what took place in 2011. Maybe it could take with a different kind of perspective. I mean, 2011 was the year in which a reggae artist called Smarty Culture died during a raid on his home. It was the year in which we saw one of the largest community protests in Birmingham following the death of a young black man called Kinsey Burrell. And of course, the riots that began in Tottenham was sparked by the police killing of Mark Duggan. But what also of course, took place in the years leading up to it was a massive escalation in police searches using a power Code Section 60, which enables the police to stop and search people without requiring any reasonable suspicion. And so, while a lot of people were focusing on the destruction and the harm that was caused during those rebellions, for me, I was also thinking about the destruction and harm that had been caused by the forms of policing harassment, violence, arrest assaults, which was the prelude to those disturbances in which I think are problems which haven't been ameliorated at all in the years which have followed.
SS:
Yeah, there's a kind of interesting point there, I think, again, coming back to the idea of policing, because, as I said, a lot of the way it's been cemented in the national memory and talked about is just a story of looting, and not really about the origins of it at all. And undoubtedly, of course, there were businesses that were destroyed, there were items that were stolen, etc, etc. But then there's this whole kind of other story about the way that those crimes were policed afterwards and the types of sentences that were handed out and so on.
AEC:
Yeah, I mean, a lot of people try to argue that these rights were not political, but clearly the value to them was deeply political, right, you know, state power and policing. But I think the aftermath was equally as political. And so I began to get involved in organisations, like the new monitoring projects in East London, or the Tottenham Defence Campaign in North London, which was helping people defend themselves against a massive escalation in arrests, raids on people's homes, instances of brutality and violence at the hands of the police, which not only was, I think, a quite a concerted effort to reestablish the existing order and reestablish the kind of policing which had led up to the rise of 2011. But also, I think, crucially, involved in intervention from central governments. And we saw people like David Cameron and other politicians make quite public statements, encouraging courts to disregard normal sentencing to treat the sentencing of people charged related offences with political punishments.
SS:
So before we get more stuck into the discussion, I just wanted to ask how you're defining racist policing, as the title of your book is Black Resistance to British Policing. There I was wondering, can we say that there's white resistance to British policing, too? And can we say that not all policing is racist? Or is it that you're getting at something that's more structural?
AEC:
So without getting too academic with people, I think it's useful to think about racism as not simply about prejudice, about there not being enough diversity, or enough training in the police force, but understanding racism is something which is institutional. So I would broadly define institutional racism as when the normal functioning of an institution produces racist outcomes. And what this means is that institutions like the police don't produce racist outcomes because there are prejudiced individuals working there who are flawed, or have some kind of unconscious bias deep within their psyche, which needs to be identified and routed out. So it's not because there aren't the kind of policies and practices necessary to ameliorate the issues in an otherwise fair system. He actually understands policing as something which is historically constituted as racist. So it understands racism as being fundamental to the foundations of both the British states and which is better understood, I think, as Imperial states rather than simply a nation state. And consequently, British policing, as most of British policing has taken place across Britain's colonies as much as it has on the British mainland. And thus, racism has been a fundamental component of British policing, for most of British policing history. And so I don't consider racism to be something which is an externality or a problem with policing, I think it’s policing functioning as it was intended to function.
SS:
That's interesting. And we'll get more into it later on the kind of Imperial roots of policing and the way that these structures are embedded into the state. For now, I wanted to ask as well about this idea of the “black folk devil” that's been present in public discourse for many years. I was actually thinking about when you were talking about the Tottenham riots and this idea of looting and mayhem and destruction and so on. But you talk about the mugger and the gangster, and so on. So I wondered what you mean by this term, the “black folk devil” and how that's been utilised recently.
AEC:
So I think the “black folk devil” can maybe help us to better understand institutional racism. So there are two things here. The first is that mugging or gang crime or knife crime aren’t crimes in and of themselves. There's nothing really in the statute books about gang crime, specifically knife crime, specifically, muggings. Specifically, they are categories of crime. And what categories of crime do is they emerge at particular historical moments, the mugger emerges in the 1970s. Gang crime emerges in the 2000s; knife crime slightly later, and these categories of crime kind of vacuum up lots of existing forms of crime, creating the impression that there is a distinctively new and different problem. Very often this new purportedly different problem is attributed to a new and different people, and very often it's migrants and/or black communities. So are the racialized minorities for which these purportedly new social criminal problems are attributed we can think about other categories of crime, like terrorism, or immigration offences and what have you. But the other thing I think is really crucial about it is it helps us to better understand institutional racism. So let's think of example in relation to so-called gangs. There were two criminologist in Manchester who are really interested in looking at gang crime across the United Kingdom. And they realised that Manchester and London both have these gangs databases, which the police fill with the names of people they've identified as being affiliated with gangs or gang crime. And they also see broken down by ethnicity, and both the Metropolitan end and the Greater Manchester Police said, Yeah, sure, here you go. Here's the gangs database broken down by this thing, and then they then ask them, okay, so how do you define a gang member? And they said, one of the main ways they define them, are people involved in serious youth violence. This can be anything from very serious offences, like discharging a firearm, or attempted murder. So you'd less serious offences like common assaults, which is effectively spitting or shoving someone. And they said, What can we have all the young people you've identified as being involved in serious youth violence, and have that broken down by ethnicity, race. And what they found was that the vast majority of the people in the gangs databases were black or Asian, whereas the majority in Manchester of the CSU violence people were whites, young people, and when it came to London, it was 50-50, which is roughly proportionate of London's youth population. This tells us the criteria that police say they're using for identifying gang members is not the criteria that they are in fact using. And in fact, race is a far more salient indicator for who is or who isn't identified as being affiliated to a gang. Now, crucially, this isn't simply because the police are these terrible, bigoted, prejudiced, immoral people. Not that I don't think that's the case at all. I think this is an example of the normal functioning of policing, producing racist outcomes. And I think that the reason this is so endemic, is because racism has been fundamental to policing for the entire history of British policing that extends beyond the British mainland, across its colonies, through which race was the fundamental way of discerning who was immoral, and who was moral, who was criminal, and who was innocent, who was deviant and who was law abiding.
SS:
And this term “folk devil” is from sociology, is that right?
AEC:
Right. Yeah. So the “folk devil” is a term which I think was popularised by people like Stuart Hall in the 1970s. And lately was adopted by others like Paul Gilroy in the 1980s and 90s. And the idea of this, the folk devil, I guess, is a popular conception of deviance, a moral outcast, somebody who the law abiding so-called majority should feel fearful of, should feel under threat from.
SS:
Yeah, it's interesting, you argue that it's often tied to this supposed threat of black masculinity. So you've got the old colonial era stereotypes about black men being hyper sexualized. There's also Enoch Powell, in his notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech warning about black immigrants robbing old white women, and so on. And I wanted to ask about where black women are in all this. So one of the most moving things that I think you highlight is black women's role in resisting discriminatory aspects of policing.
AEC:
Yes, so one of the things I noticed when I began my field research was I began working with lots of different campaigns, which were led by the families of people who had died at the hands of the police. And what became really apparent was that almost every single one of these campaigns was led by a woman. And so I began to ask people, why is it that you think that women lead all of these so many, almost all of these campaigns, and I think there are maybe two or three broad themes that I picked up. The first was that too often, when people die at the hands of the police, particularly black people, they are framed as being dysfunctional, as criminal, as deviant, as coming from quote, unquote, single parents households, which couldn't look after them properly, places that were chaotic, devoid of love. And I think that by presenting themselves, not as these militants would, chaotic activists, but instead as grieving parents, as mothers, sisters, as widows, I think enables a lot of these activists to win over sections of the press or members of the public or politicians or the court systems. But I think there's something else happening here as well, which I think is also really crucial. Because, while they do often present themselves as grieving mothers and what have you, maybe Doreen Lawrence, the mother of Stephen Lawrence, who is perhaps one of the most well known examples of this, these women are also politically critical, politically engaged, and many of them actually politically radical. And when I interview and speak to them, and their speeches at rallies and protests and public meetings, many of them draw on those histories of colonialism and slavery and talk about the role of women who are separated from their children for the violence of Empire. They talk about the other women who have been, who have come before them who fought against injustices and violence in the hands of the states. And crucially, they articulate a sense of family and belonging, not simply as being this kind of nuclear family structure, which has been torn apart by state violence, but actually family as being something that goes beyond bloodlines, or the nuclear family, which is a sense of solidarity, which is a sense of community, and family, which is a sense of, of collective resistance in collective care. And I thought that it was really a really powerful way of articulating a form of black feminism, which I think doesn't always identify itself as such, but I think is really marked by ways of understanding states and police violence is not simply about race and class, but also about gender.
SS:
That's fascinating, because I think, much as you have all these stereotypes around black masculinity, as you say, these stereotypes around single parent families, or aggressive black women and so on are equally prevalent in our culture, aren't they? And this is what you're describing. And you know, that the kind of activism on the ground is so far removed from that.
AEC:
Yeah, I think you're completely right. And I think we've seen this in often an almost unspoken way through the kinds of policies and practices that mainstream governments has implemented. When we think about Boris Johnson's mentoring projects when he was London mayor, or when we think about the other kinds of projects which seek to mentor, young, particularly young black boys, but working class boys more generally, I think, who have been brought up in by just one parents, generally a mother, and apparently, being brought up by mother means that they haven't been imbued with the kind of moral values necessary that only a man can imbue, haven't been brought up with a strong sense of identity and self worth, that apparently only a man can offer them. And I think this kind of way, implicitly, I think degrades women and frames men as being the arbiters of morality and discipline and justice, both in the home and outside of it.
SS:
And I wanted to jump back to talking about knife crime. So you talked earlier about the gangs matrix, and the way that we talk about knife crime and serious youth violence is often very racialized in tone. So yeah, what do you think is wrong with the way we talk about knife crime? And I think one interesting comparison is between the way we talk about knife crime in London and Manchester, as you mentioned earlier, and the way we talk about it in Glasgow. iIt's something you go into.
AEC:
Right, yeah. So as I mentioned before, knife crime, of course, isn't a crime, right? It's a category of crime. And it's a category of crime which emerges as particular historical moments, maybe about 15-20 years ago or so, and has continually kind of expanded as we see more sections of the press or politicians or the police using this term. And what it can do is create the impression that this is a new problem and a problem which is increasing rapidly. But I think what's often the case, as well, as you mentioned, is that it's a category of crime which is racially charged. When we look at the images that are used on the television or listen to the commentary from people like Piers Morgan and others, we continually see race being associated with knife crime. And I think there are probably two or three problems with this. The first is that, of course, when we see crimes involving bladed implements being used in places like Glasgow, race isn't used to explain why it is we have these problems. So while even the United Nations has visited Glasgow and described it as one of the most violent cities in Europe, when this problem arises and is analysing Glasgow races and how we explain these issues, we see written questions of class, questions relating to addiction and poverty and inequality in housing and mental health, more often used in these kinds of context. But as soon as this question of knife crime becomes racialized, race becomes the explanatory factor. And I think the reason that racism is so important, therefore, isn't simply because it is empirically untrue that the vast majority of so-called knife crime in Britain is carried out by young black people. I think the real issue is how we explain an association between race and knife crime. And it's through race being the way in which we explain knife crime that I think the real problem arises. Because once we explain crime through race, rather than explaining crime through the facts that people live in conditions, which are more likely to breed these forms of violence, then we not only reproduce forms of racism, but we negate the underlying issues which leads to the issue of rising crime in the first place.
AB:
Hi there I'm Alice, I produce With Reason and today you're hearing Samira Shackle talking to the sociologist Adam Elliott-Cooper about racism, policing and resistance. If you want to hear more about that, go back to series two to catch Luke de Noronha talking about his work on Jamaica and the UK, his book Deporting Black Britons. He talks a little bit more actually about this idea of being criminalised that Adam may have already been touching on here. And if you enjoy listening to With Reason, you'll love New Humanist magazine, a quarterly journal of ideas, science and culture. To get a half price discount on a year's subscription, head to newhumanists.org.uk/subscribe and enter the offer code WITHREASON. That means you'll get four print editions through your door through each year, all for the modest sum of £13.50. back now to Samira and Adam.
SS:
So there's often this tendency for people in Britain to assume that if someone talks about racist policing, they're probably talking about America. And I think that probably goes beyond policing to this idea that racism is somehow much worse in America than it is in the UK. Or even that you shouldn't talk about racism and racist policing, in particular, in the US and in the UK in the same breath, because there's just no comparison at all. Why do you think that is?
AEC:
So I think that Britain is really good at creating the impression that racism is something that happens somewhere else; it's something that happens in the United States, it's something that happens in South Africa, or at least used to happen in South Africa. But here in Britain, we don't do race, right, we do class. And I think the reason Britain is able to reproduce this kind of self image is because for most of Britain's history it hasn't been doing race on the British mainland. For most of its history, it's been doing racism in its colonies across the Caribbean, the African continent, Australia, much of Asia, and, of course, much of the Middle East and elsewhere. And so I think because of this geographical barrier between where Britain has been doing race and the British mainland, it's able to kind of create this kind of conceptual barrier between where Britain resides, and where racism resides. And I think this is linked to an idea which people like Paul Gilroy, again, has talked about, which is this idea of colonial amnesia, because people talk about American racism as being totally unconnected and different to British racism, as if Britain and America are unconnected, as if people in America speak English, because of some weird quirk of history, because of some unexplained natural phenomenon, when in fact, of course, and the United States is, in many way, a creation of a number of European countries, but principally Britain. And so by looking through those histories of Empire, and how Empire is fundamental to the constitution of Britain, both historically, and today, we can better understand the role that the United States has played not as a completely separate entity, where a worse kind of racism has evolved in a completely distinct way to Britons, but actually how Britain and America's racism are historically linked throughout history, but also today.
SS:
You talked earlier about how this history of racial discrimination and colonialism is built into British policing, sort of from its foundations. I wonder if you could talk a bit more about that. And also, is that something that's particular to policing? Are you talking more generally about the state?
AEC:
It's useful to understand Britain not as a nation-state, but as an imperial state. Britain has never existed, since it was established in 1707, without colonists, and racism has therefore always been fundamental to British governance, right? Across all of its institutions. I think policing is a particularly interesting one, because of the way in which we've seen policies, practices, and people from Britain's colonies migrate to the British mainland, bringing those policing policies and practices with them, right. So maybe one or two quick examples. Probably the most one of the most well known include Sir Kenneth Newman, who was head of the Metropolitan Police, brought in after the 1981 riots to deal with this problem of black youth and urban rebellion, and he cut his teeth really first in British Mandate Palestine as a police officer, but then gained his knighthood in Ireland where he had been responsible for handing over power from the British Army towhat became the Royal Ulster Constabulary. And so because of his experience in dealing with unruly natives and racialized others across these colonies, he was considered to be a suitable candidate for the role of a head of the best parts in police and with him. And during this time, more colonial policies are brought to the British mainland. So this included in 1981, for instance, for the first time on the British mainland, we see the use of tear gas, and other forms of poison gas, we see the colonial tactic of driving an armoured vehicle into crowds in order to disperse them which a young man lost his life in Toxteth in Liverpool. We see forms of armoured, policing and other forms of more militarised weaponry being used for the first time and in 1985, Sir Kenneth Newman actually brings baton rounds to the scene of Broadwater Farm in Tottenham, in North London again, the first time these have been brought to the scene of a civic disturbance on the British mainland. But these are all policing practices which had been used for many years in Britain's colonies in places like Malaya and Kenya, and Trinidad and Guyana, and Jamaica, and Ireland. And they were being brought to the British mainland, as people from Britain's colonies and former colonies were considered to have posed a different kind of threat, a specific kind of racial threat to Britain, and thus requiring a form of colonial governance in order to deal with them.
SS:
And your book, although this is all so kind of embedded into the state, the book and talking about resistance, I think it offers a kind of hope as well about the future. So I wondered what the alternative is to the type of policing that we have at the moment. So is it possible at all to build a more progressive police force if racism is so embedded into the state? And if so, how, what could we be doing differently?
AEC:
So over the last 30 or 40 years in this country, the prison population has almost doubled, the women's prison population has more than doubled. And we've seen the police expand in their ability to surveil our digital communications’ use and other forms of power of surveillance, to impose injunctions upon people to stop them from seeing certain people and going to certain places, making music using social media, what have you. But we haven't seen a significant improvement in public safety. Public safety is still a major concern for many people. And a lot of the community organisations I worked with, during the course of my research, particularly those who were youth led, were seeking to find other ways of improving public safety. And for many of the young people we worked with, when we asked them, okay, so what does a safe community look like, a lot of them said, Well, I know that if I go to a suburban area, it's probably going to be pretty safe. And the reason it's safe isn't because there's a police officer on every corner, because everyone who lives in the middle class suburbs lives under the constant threat of incarceration, if they put a foot wrong. It’s because people in these middle class suburbs are more likely to have access to a good job, secure housing, access to education, and mental health provision if they need it, addiction services, all of the kinds of fundamental things that people need in order to live a healthy and prosperous existence. And if we continue to erode and not replace the public services, which have been defunded over the course of the last 15 years since the global financial crisis, but instead continue to expand our police and prison system, I think we're going to only continue to exacerbate the problems which led to the 2011 riots and also not really improve issue the issues of public safety, which I think everybody wants to address. And so I think that what a lot of community organisations are arguing, actually, is that we should be arguing for less policing, less reliance on prison power, because reliance on police and prisons I think, isn't the sign of a strong society, which certain political parties might tell you it is but actually is a sign of a weak society. And a stronger society relies less on police in prisons, and more on alternatives to that place in prison system - strong trade unions and renters unions for people to have better jobs and better housing, strong youth and community organisations for people to get the kinds of social support that they need, support for survivors of domestic violence and child abuse. All of these types of things, which, in some parts of the activist communities, they call “defunding the police” and investing in communities instead. And I think that these kinds of political visions try to construct a world in which we don't rely on police and prisons anymore. And I think this might be a utopian vision that we can't imagine, in our lifetimes, but I think it's something that a lot of communities are trying to work towards on a piecemeal basis, one community centre, one youth project at a time.
SS:
Yeah, that phrase, that slogan “defunding the police”, I think is one that's quite often misunderstood. It seems to make people really angry in the mainstream a lot of the time. It's this idea that it's advocating for a lawless society. But that's not really what it is at all, is it?
AEC:
I mean, it has a lot more behind it. As you've just said, the people who are most likely to be the victims of violence or harm in our society are lower income communities, are very often racialized minorities. And the fact that these slogans and these ideas are coming out of these communities isn't therefore coming out of a place of ignorance, it’s coming out to a place that just said, Look, this law and order policing, this expansion of police and prison power is not working. And not only is it not working. It's actually oppressing us. One analogy that a friend of mine uses is, it's like having a leak in your roof, you call your landlord and ask the landlord to fix the leak in the roof. And they come to you with a bucket to catch the drips of water. And a month later, you ask them to fix the leak in the roof cause it got bigger, and they come back to your home with a bigger bucket. Of course, the bucket is useful whilst the roof is leaking, but it's not going to fix the root issue of what's causing that roof to leak and the water to drip into your home. So whilst it makes sense, in some ways, in the short term to get bigger and bigger buckets, in the longer term, what we really need to do is to fix that roof, what we really need is to fix the root causes of the kinds of social inequalities which lead to people coming into the context of the police and prison system in the first place.
SS:
And we started off talking about institutional racism. And that's been been a sort of intimate point of discussion for decades now in the UK. And I think often when there's a discussion about solutions in the public sphere, at least, it's about, it kind of comes down to seeking greater diversity in institutions like the police. So promoting more black officers, having more black people in leadership positions and so on. You're critical of this idea that diversity is the answer. So maybe you could tell me about that and what you think better, more effective action would look like.
AEC:
So we've seen the kind of liberal demands for diversity become increasingly popular over the last 30 or 20 or 30 years, and I think probably reached a crescendo in this country with the McPherson report, which demanded a massive increase in police diversity, and of course, probably reaching an even greater crescendo in the United States with the election of Barack Obama. And it's in these two contexts that we see the fact that actually police violence and police racism hasn't improved at all. And I think the reason that people thought that this kind of representation could work is perhaps slightly out of what can only really be a historical naivety. Because of course, Britain has been doing diversity initiatives for a very long time. But it hasn't been doing it on the British mainland. It did diversity initiatives in places like Rhodesia, in Nigeria, and Kenya. It did diversity initiatives in Jamaica and Guyana and Trinidad in India and Malaysia, because it had to recruit people from the colonised populations into their police forces and their court systems and their educational institutions and, and other systems of power and governance and control. And what we saw in all of these contexts was, as Franz Fanon and others have articulated so well, was the reproduction of the same systems of power, but with a few black faces in high places. And I think perhaps therefore, we should be unsurprised that those same patterns of inequality had been reproduced today. And maybe the most vivid example of this is this current conservative governments, which has one of the most ethnically diverse cabinets in British history and of course has its very well known commission for racial, racial and ethnic disparities where much like the colonial administrators of yesteryear have recruited people from the colonised or racialised populations into its systems of power to only continue the very same systems of institutional racism for which anti racists have demanded change for so long.
SS:
So we've been speaking just now about this idea of diversity, both in things like police recruitment, and more generally. And in recent years, we've seen quite a few books from people like Reni Eddo Lodge and Robyn D'Angelo, which explicitly reference white people in their titles. So, Eddo Lodge’s book is Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race and d’Angelo's book is White Fragility: Why It's So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism. Those are just two examples. But people seem to get quite angry about this idea that whiteness is an identity in itself. It’s something that we explored in the magazine in New Humanists back in 2017. And so Adam, why do you think that people get so angry at the suggestion that whiteness is an identity that's worthy of examination?
AEC:
So I think that very often whiteness is considered the default human being to which all other human beings are compared. Whiteness is the Greenwich Meantime of human dispositions; it is the centre of our social world. And I think that's therefore making it visible, and can often make people feel uncomfortable because it's so often it is actually invisible. But I think what’s also really crucial is that the work that people like Ron were doing, I think, situates whiteness, not as something which is simply embodied in all white people as Robyn D'Angelo does, but something which is historically constituted, which is something which is a historical invention. And therefore, if it's something which is had been historically invented, I, at one point, people, European people decided to begin identifying themselves as white in order to differentiate themselves from the peoples that they were colonising, which they were racializing, as, as red or black, or brown, or what have you. This means that we can also dismantle these identities, this means we can also dismantle these categories. And I think that's really crucial for one or two reasons. The first, of course, is that it means that racism is something that everybody is implicated in, in one way or another. But it also I think, helps us to better understand how people are exploited differently and divided through these racial categories. It creates the impression that a lower income working class person who identifies as white has more in common with Piers Morgan, or Boris Johnson, or Jeremy Clarkson, than they do with their Asian neighbour, or their black coworker. And so what this also does, of course, is obscures the way in which people have commonalities in the way in which they're exploited or experienced oppression, and creates what WEB Du Bois called a “wage of whiteness”, where people who are racialized as white can say, well, I might be exploited at work, and I might be harassed on the streets, and I might be worried about my pension and whether my children are going to get a home, but at least I can, in some immaterial, intangible way, identify with this idea of whiteness, and all of the people that it represents, whether that be the royal family, or the people who run governments or other ideas or institutions of influence and notoriety.
SS:
Yeah, I was thinking of, in I think it was in 2019, when Jon Snow was presenting on Channel Four, and he referred to there being a lot of white people at a pro-Brexit rally, and there were loads of complaints to Ofcom about it just for using that term. And I wondered if things have moved on since then. We obviously last year had the massive Black Lives Matters protests, both in the UK and around the world. Are we thinking about whiteness more or examining it more? In general, I don't know about in academia where you are, or sort of more generally, in public discourse.
AEC:
I think what's happened with Jon Snow was really interesting because it helps us to differentiate between white people and whiteness. So when Jon Snow identifies a Brexit rally, and says there's lots of white people here, what he's really identifying is whiteness, it's people really kind of using their whiteness to engage in a political project. But what I saw in the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 were Black Lives Matter protests in small towns and villages across England and Wales and Scotland, which had maybe never seen an anti racist mobilisation before. And were almost exclusively white. But when I saw people, white people coming out in places that didn't have very much ethnic diversity, I didn't see them doing whiteness, I saw them actually pushing back against this idea that whiteness is how people should identify. And therefore, racism, anti racism is something that other people should be invested in. And in fact, I think they were pushing against whiteness, and the kind of political projects like Brexit, which have sought to mobilise whiteness to divide different people across countries like Britain. So I think that differentiating between white people and whiteness, I think has become so crucial over the last few years, as more and more people racialized as white have become invested in anti racist struggle not only through the kinds of rallies and mobilisation that we saw in 2020, but also through the new anti racist organisations like Anti Racist Cumbria, for instance, which has come out of the protest movements in 2020, which is made up of huge number of white people. But they aren't I think invested in whiteness in the way in which the Brexit protests that Jon Snow identified all those years ago and gotten all that trouble for.
SS:
Yeah, I think the exact quote from Jon Snow was that he had never seen so many white people in one place. Anyway, thank you, Adam. Elliott-Cooper, thanks so much for sharing all of that with us.
AEC:
I thank you so much for having me on. Really appreciate it.
SS:
Adam Elliott-Cooper discussing his book Black Resistance to British Policing. Our producer Alice is with me now. So Alice, some of the themes that we touched on there have echoes of the interview that you did with Luke de Noronha in series two, which was about his book Deporting Black Britons. So what struck you listening to Adam there?
AB:
Well, it's interesting, isn't it? I mean, Luke is actually a sociologist just like Adam is, and one of the reasons I really like sociology is that it complicates this idea of the individual. And I really liked how Adam kind of goes beyond the interpersonal, which, of course, is really still important, and I think he would acknowledge that, but he goes beyond that, and focuses on the state and he says, you know, this is structural, this isn't an externality, it's part of our story, it's part of a kind of very deep embedded history that probably is so deeply embedded that a lot of us are actually blind to it, you know. His point on that reminds me of Orwell's writing on Burma. Also, though, you know, he may be a sociologist, but his work, or at least his conversation with you there, reminds me of contract theory and politics - this idea that, you know, you kind of enter into a bit of a bargain with the state, you accept the authority of the state, because ultimately, the state on balance is going to provide you with some kind of security, it's going to protect you. And it's probably better than if you're just outside of it on your own. And that's, you know, so-called state of nature, etc. But obviously, actually, as feminists have argued, re women in the state, what happens if the state doesn't protect you? What happens if you feel that the state isn't really made in your name? And that's something that Adam is pointing to, I think.
SS:
I think that point about the individual and the state is really an interesting one, you see it a lot with the way that the concept of white privilege is talked about and how it's become very controversial. In the media, it's almost like a culture war point. I think that's actually a term that originated to diagnose a structural problem, but it often ends up in a sort of defensiveness, I think, of people saying, you know, I don't have privileges just because I'm white, looking at all these ways in which I'm disadvantaged. And that sort of misses the point, I think, because it's a way of talking about racialized structures and differences and so on. But when it kind of comes down to this individual level, I think there can be a reflexive defensiveness. So yeah, it's, I think, very useful to have more focus on the structures and the histories that we're all operating within.
AB:
Yeah, certainly. And actually another word that people get very kind of, I guess, if not defensive, but rather stirred and angry by at all ends of the political spectrum is this term “diversity” that you and Adam also talked about. That reminds me of one book I'd love to read. It's from a little while ago, still certainly relevant, though, I think it's called On Being Included by the feminist Sara Ahmed. And that book is about kind of what happens when diversity is put forward as a so-called solution in institutions, you know, higher education, for example. And really, she talks about how, you know, racism, quote, can be obscured by the institutionalisation of diversity. So that's just a reminder really, that, you know, diversity, we really have to probe what's going on when someone raises that word, I guess, especially in a corporate context, it's something that I'm thinking about a bit at the moment reading a novel by Natasha Brown called Assembly, which is very much on that on that subject.
SS:
Yeah, I think you've seen this argument play out, as you say, with feminism as well, this whole idea of women in boardrooms being an end goal in and of itself. And what Adam was talking about with having more black officers in the police, for instance, in senior roles. And I guess the thing is, it's not a bad aim to have that. But if it's purely symbolic, and those people aren't given the tools to sort of bring about the cultural change, which is actually what you need, then it's a bit of a sticking plaster solution, I guess. It's not an end goal in itself. Also, if the kind of real burden is put on those individuals only to be the generators of change, then that's not really fair either. That's kind of reducing them to one dimension of their identity. And that would be an incredibly exhausting position to have to be in. It would involve a lot of work on top of your work. Yeah, a whole other issue. And so not not the most positive place to end but as I said, Adam’s book in documenting the kind of community resistance that's happening all around the UK and has happened through history does offer notes of hope. Remember, you can find reading lists and transcripts for all episodes of With Reason at newhumanist.org.uk.
AB:
This podcast was presented by Samira Shackle with me, Alice Block, and our sound engineer was the excellent Dave Crackles.
SS:
Thanks for listening and see you back here soon. Bye
