It is easy to regard, and thus disregard, the riots following the conviction of Henry Nowak’s murderer as an explosion of reaction by a flammable and motivated minority. The more uncomfortable truth is that a specific notion, that people of colour have been privileged over and above mere equality, and been given dominion over white people, is now mainstream. Whether it is in the rejection of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, or in claims of “two-tier policing”, the current moment can seem as though it is about all sorts of disparate things: immigration, concerns over housing, cultural dilution, basic fairness. But it’s really broadly about one thing – equality has gone too far. The black man has the whip hand over the white man.
As you can tell by the previous line, this is not a new notion, now recycled by Nigel Farage when he says that there is “a two-tier culture in this country, where the rights and privileges of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities”. It is, at its most simple, backlash. The sort of pushback that has followed every single wave of civil rights progress and efforts at enfranchisement.
But while these efforts in the past have been contested in the arena of policy, such as voting rights, they are now contested in the realm of culture. In hashtagged movements and marches of solidarity that call less for sweeping legal measures than cultural change: #MeToo, women’s marches, Black Lives Matter protests. The result is their own backlashes have also been formulated in the same language, “not all men” ,“white lives matter” – a competing identitarian politics, grounded in victimhood.
I have heard it casually mentioned in far less restive contexts than Southampton’s streets. In grumbles about not getting a job because it will probably go to an (unqualified) ethnic minority, or anxieties about a child not getting into their chosen university because their place will go to a brown or black kid to fill a “quota”. These are otherwise sensible people who have never had a single experience of tangible discrimination, but who nevertheless believe they are living under a state of systemic codified racism towards them.
That mimicry is in part because of both the success and failure of recent movements for equality. When it comes to race in particular, the gains of the past few years have resulted in a sharp but fleeting cultural saturation with the meaningful but symbolic: taking the knee, taking down statues, tussles over imperial histories and academic curriculums, and the expansion of diversity measures everywhere, from private enterprise to TV adverts. The overall effect this has created is a sense of racial elevation of minorities and a high visibility of race discourse. All the while, minorities continue to labour under income poverty – “very deep poverty”, which is higher for people in households headed by someone from a minority ethnicity. They are disproportionately more policed than their white counterparts and more likely to be prosecuted. The result is that, as these complaints persist, some white people who have experienced recent years of racial justice movements as a surfeit of redress think, what are you still going on about?
There is also the way in which racial justice has always been, but in an age of social media even more so, a mimetic language, a narrative, a binding story of identity. I can see how that can become coveted and copied to create another binding story for those who would not swap places with an ethnic minority for a single day, and yet crave that sense of group distinction. And so victimhood becomes purloined as currency, used to galvanise your own group, bring them out in their own protests and marches in a literal land grab from others who claimed the streets as their own to demand equality for women and racial minorities and to free Palestine.
This is a legacy of a much wider erosion of the ways in which we can come together as a collective around things that aren’t just about competitions with other races for the prize of most subjugated. A rapacious individualisation is the legacy of the smashing of places to gather, where people could once identify material concerns (rather than race hallucinations) and collectively bargain for their delivery. The trade union movement is weakened, labour itself is changing into something more precarious and atomised. Deindustrialisation wrecked working-class systems and the halo of social and cultural life around them. Austerity undermined the ability to commune in free spaces and mix socially, in youth clubs, in family support centres, and drove people indoors and on to their phones and into a state of hermetic siege.
All of this is happening against a backdrop of scarcity of all sorts. Not just cost of living crises, but more stressed housing, healthcare and state schooling, which intensify that state of siege. This is not to suggest that actual racism, pure and uncomplicated, is not a factor, but that its activation into something violent and aggressive is more easily achieved in such conditions. The correctives to these conditions are hampered by the long march of modernity and by governments, both Labour and Conservative, that have resigned themselves to the inevitability of austerity. And with that has come a failure to articulate a new class politics, one in which people no longer array themselves in terms of work or industry, but would recognise themselves as being on the sharp end of a capital- and asset-owning class that privatises, gouges and exploits. However, that dynamic is never identified. Appealing to vague groups such as “working people” isn’t going to cut it.
Filling this chasm are the calls of Farage, Elon Musk and the vice-president of the US, who took time out to tell us that Henry Nowak’s death would not have happened if “generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants”. Bonkers but resonant, it feeds into an ambient sense of an overlord class that has thrown you under the bus. The awful killing of Henry Nowak has been so energetically campaigned around by many because they see it as an opportunity to take more terrain, to position people of colour and their white allies as enemies punch drunk on the victory of wokeness. And, in doing so, marshal feeling and loyalty towards politicians who have no interest or ability to do the hard work of government.
There is a depressing inevitability to all of this. The battle was pretty much lost long ago – with the ground eroding every time a liberal political leader hid from or sneered at culture wars, or sought to appease by acknowledging so-called “legitimate concerns” and the nativist obsession with strong borders. (A lot of good that did them.) But the second best time to start the fight is now. We either accept that racial victimhood is now a growing feature of our politics, or remake that politics by standing in the winds of backlash to grapple with race contests, cynically manufactured, cynically deployed as battle strategy. It won’t be easy. But what other choice is there?
