Barbelith Underground > Head Shop > Jade - Shilpa - Multiculturalism

I think I can put my ideas into a clearer form now: I guess I'm worried that, if Britain really has started to care about racism, then the underpriviledged are now being marked as racists by the priviledged, which is a) unfair because of economic factors that put more pressure on the underpriviledged to be antagonistic, and b) often highly hypocritical on the part of the priviledged because they can be just as racist but dress it up as something else - "criticising Islam", say, or "concern about immigration". I see something similar happening w/regard to homophobia as well.

This is one I've been thinking about too, if I understand correctly what you've written here. I think humans are really keen to scapegoat others for social crimes. 'Racism' is known to be social crime in a lot of British public arenas, but perhaps the study of racism is not sufficiently advanced for public occurences to be handled constructively.

As I understand it white supremacy is embedded in a lot of the cultural habits I've picked up, and as such I think being anti-racist is a collective endeavour and a work in progress. I know I catch myself in racist thinking too often for me to be complacent about my own part, but after some years of study I feel I am making progress in dismantling the conditioning I received as I grew up.

So in my model of racism, racist acts are very common and mostly unconscious. When I find myself enacting one, it's an unpleasant learning experience but I'm articulate enough to use it as fuel to my consciousness-raising.

I suspect that if you use a model of prejudice where acts of racial privilege are only ever conscious, it's easy to have the idea that there are "not racist" people and "racist" people (rather than "people who are all embedded in a system which carries out white supremacist prvilege through them to differing extents"). Once that assumption of a binary division of humanity's in place it's pretty easy to point fingers.

I think there's a lot of glee when people can point at behaviour they judge to be clearly prejudiced and perhaps that glee stems from this binary model of the world. Perhaps it runs something like this: "since I'm the one pointing at the racist behavious therefore I'm not racist". The fingerpointer gets to assert their membership in the socially acceptable "not racist" classification and presumably by doing so feels no further need to interrogate the power relations occuring in their lives between themselves people with different degrees of skin pigmentation?

It's much more comfortable to say "she's racist, she used hatespeech" than to glumly accept that her more obvious racism is evidence of the same deeprooted white supremacy that's affecting me and everyone else I know, and which seems to be only slightly easier to uproot than knotweed.

To relate this to what you wrote above, I guess perhaps the fingerpointers tend to be more articulate - perhaps just faster to claim the moral high ground. From what I've understand about scapegoating (mostly material about Rene Girard's christology in Walter Wink's 'Engaging the Powers') it's usual to choose those who have least power as scapegoats - because the community loses least that way when expelling them symbolically for the sins of the whole group.

The problem with scapegoating as I understand it is that the offending behaviour is a systemic property, and expelling or punishing the person judged to have sinned is only a temporary solution. Unless the work is put in to remove the root of the behaviour amongst the group as a whole - unlearning attitudes of racist, homophobia or whatever other dominance system - further scapegoating cycles will follow without progress having been made on the underlying problem.

Jade - Shilpa - Multiculturalism - Class