Projected racism

Citation

Dollins, P. (2003), "Projected racism", European Business Review, Vol. 15 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.2003.05415cab.003

Projected racism

Peter DollinsPeter Dollins is a writer and former teacher, based in London.

Keywords: Race relations, Politics, Society AbstractThe author grew up in a Communist household and has borne personal witness to most of the traumas of the Marxist Left since World War II: revelations of Stalinist terror; Hungary and Prague; and the final collapse of Soviet-style "socialism". In spite of these crises, he identifies a powerful strand of humane and rational thought associated with the British Left that issued a powerful challenge to class injustice. He sees the Left's surrender to "politically correct" obsessions (mostly imported from the USA) to be a grave threat to that humanitarian tradition, at just the time when a coherent left-wing critique is needed. This article is part of an ongoing research project.

"We are all white so there might even be racists among us and we wouldn't even know it," said the speaker at the Reclaim the Streets environmental group meeting in London. He stared around him, sweat collecting in the furrow of his brow. Why is he so disturbed? I wondered. If he is not a racist himself, then the problem is not his. Yet I could remember myself as a young man on the political Left experiencing the same gut-wrenching horror at the merest thought of racism. Then, all that trauma and lack of comprehension of the "other" inside me was projected onto the world outside. To ask myself the difficult questions or face the source of my traumas was just too painful. The unresolved "other", like the Devil, comes in many forms, as a different tribe or colour, but also in the supposition that those with views and experiences different from our own are a contaminating force – the source of all racism, all prejudice, all evil. For what we see and condemn outside of ourselves may simply be those parts of ourselves that we refuse to explore or come to terms with.

Britain's Secretary of State for Culture, Mrs’Tessa Jowell, recently asked "all parties to condemn the vile campaign of racist hatred and abuse against the Chair and staff" of the National Lottery Charity Board. This was after a popular national newspaper, The Daily Mail, printed their addresses. The Mail had been campaigning vigorously against Lottery grants to a range of "politically correct" causes popular with the Left but unpopular with the public and especially with the white working class: a particular target of rage were Lottery-funded organisations advancing the interests of asylum seekers – an emotive issue in Britain, as elsewhere in Europe. Whilst politically correct causes were funded, other groups such as village halls and small local museums had their applications turned down. This aroused anger and concern among many British people, regardless of ethnic background, and required a political answer. But Mrs Jowell continued: "Human excrement and needles sent through the post, threats of physical violence, all in all, that is the disgusting face of racial thuggery masquerading as concern for the Lottery." The emotional emphasis of her words brought to mind the so-called "Rivers of Blood" speech made by Enoch Powell at the end of the 1960s, in which he inveighed against what was then called "coloured" immigration. I seem to recall that in this speech, which struck an instant popular chord, Powell also spoke of excrement posted through the letterboxes of old ladies by immigrant children.

Our Culture Secretary did not reveal whether or not any letters came with sensible arguments, or whether some writers were deluded or off the point or merely misled. She did not try to argue the point, still less defend the Lottery grants on moral or even ideological grounds. No, Mrs Jowell merely bundled all these letters from members of the public into one category. Yet it seems highly unlikely that every letter received contained "excrement and needles" or "threats of physical violence". By lumping all these letters into such a disgusting and criminal category, Tessa Jowell showed herself to be a sufferer from Projected Racism. As Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (to give her her full title), she presides over media empires increasingly arrogant towards the public. She bears ultimate responsibility for an atmosphere in which vulgarity becomes ever more dominant and where an organised jeering at members of the public becomes the norm. "Is he the biggest nobody in the UK?" trilled a female presenter on Channel 4 not long ago, when trailing a new adventure in "Reality TV". Is he indeed, this white middle-aged man our pretty female presenter picked, or is it the person who would deign to run such a competition? The general stupefying of our media has accelerated under the "New Labour" administration and reflects the arrogant condescension of the Labour government towards those it still claims to represent.

In the 1960s, the workers were cultural heroes and working class writers had some access to the media through such openings as "The Wednesday Play" and its competing offshoots. Now, they are our culture's anti-heroes with all access to the media closed, except for those sections of the media (including the right-wing tabloids) which would seek to manipulate and stupefy them. The working class have been displaced as culture heroes, both by the liberal media and by the Left, which was set up to represent them. In place of the working class are elevated a number of bien pensant middle class obsessions, chiefly connected with "race" and "racism", but not addressing the reality of either and with little relevance to real black people, least of all the black working class.

One of the strangest twists in this phenomenon of "race awareness" is a doctrine of reverse racial purity. Recently, a number of (largely white) film critics complained that Halle Berry, the new James Bond girl, is "not black enough". Perhaps we need to go to the "blackest" tribes of "darkest" Africa to salve their consciences. Greg Dyke, the (white) Director General of the BBC, described the bulk of the corporation, its personnel and output as being "hideously white". "White" became a racist insult, but there was no race relations tribunal on hand to censure the DG. "White" is the new "black": inherently racist, intrinsically evil and doubly bad if male rather than female. As the country's industrial base is destroyed, the white working class are being given a good old cultural kicking by their Blairite "betters".

Racism, along with sexism and much of today's "politically correct" agenda, become a modern equivalent of the witch-hunt. In fact, as soon as you see the terms "all white, male, middle-aged" meant as a slur you might be fairly certain that here is an example of projected racism, sexism and ageism. Yet crude "straight" racists find ammunition through such projections. The indifferent populace, seeing their slight privileges trampled as they face accusations of racism, or "unconscious" racism, or "institutional" racism, or "deferred" racism (amongst many other theological niceties of the New Inquisition), become disgruntled and lean towards "straight" racism. This is especially the case if they have dared to ask for their interests to be taken into account, and been faced with bureaucratic silence or false and hysterical accusations (such as the words of Tessa Jowell). We know from the experience of twentieth century Europe that, however much reverse racism exists, nothing can justify or excuse the descent into "straight" racism. But we should also remember that racist movements – in particular Nazism – rose to power because of the indifference and insulation of a political elite, which failed to respond to genuine and legitimate concerns. The Left ignored working class interests then, and let Hitler package himself as a "National Socialist" whilst doing the plutocrats' dirty work for them.

The bureaucratic manipulators of "anti-racist" hysteria are often the very benefactors of a class prejudice institutionalised in the UK since the Norman invasion. The campaign against "racism" is just another manipulative tool by which an elite effectively balkanises the population and perpetuates its economic and cultural dominance. The self-righteous bourgeois is as much alive today as in the days of Marx. He or she presents the working class as racist "scum" who must be directed, weakened, divided, stamped upon and, above all, denied a political voice. To the middle class New Left, the Generation of 68, the indigenous working class are guilty of betrayal, because they did not rise up in revolution on cue and do not obediently reflect the "politically correct" world view.

When the Council housing estate in inner London where I live tried to turn itself into a Housing Association, the Labour local authority were frightened. According to an advisor on Housing Associations who addressed us, they were "horrified at the thought of a solid working class estate running itself". For if this happened in a large scale the Council could no longer control its working class population and impose on it an ever-burgeoning agenda of politically correct hysterics. Needless to say, our application to govern ourselves was turned down. Since then, the estate has been run by the Council consciously in the interests of African, Asian and South American residents, and consciously to the detriment of the "white" working class. Reverse racism is breeding straight racism, and a fuse of resentment slowly burns.

The tortured souls of the Left, who should be recognising and analysing this false consciousness, are in the vanguard of racial hysteria. A friend, whom I shall call Brian, is a member of the Socialist Workers Party. I described to him an Irishman's experience of racism and prejudice from the Housing Charity for which I once worked. Brian, then part of the Council's Housing and Homeless Unit's team, said: "No. The only racism there is white against black. There is no other racism." It did me no good to remind Brian of my younger days, when the sign "No Dogs, No Irish" could still be painted on little white boards, or of countless statements (then and now) of ugly anti-Irish statements and prejudice. I tried to tell Brian of how an old Communist friend in my distant youth described the Italians as "greasy wops". "No." It made no difference how many examples I gave. The party line was the same – there is no such thing as racism, except when it is white against black. It has been widely observed that the SWP is Trotskyist in ideology but Stalinist in character, but Brian's collection of attitudes – alternative prejudices – signify a form of infantilism. Lenin presciently described "Left-Wing Communism" as an "Infantile Disorder". Since the collapse of orthodox Communism, the Infantile Left has returned, its slogans replacing the old Common Good arguments of the traditional Left.

Brian is a tortured man incapable of facing up to his personal traumas, or the problems they cause for himself and others. His party, the SWP, and other minority left-wing groups, provide the ideological basis for the propaganda and double-think that emanates from the "liberal" media, government departments, local authorities, state schools, the police and every area of English life you care to name these days. In this atmosphere, increasingly redolent of 1984, the "proles" are kept down by power hungry bureaucrats, who police their everyday conversations for political incorrectness but will not give them basic economic security or protect them from crime.

Friedrich Hayek, the radical free-market author of Road to Serfdom, showed how Austrian socialists in the inter-war years pruned individual safeguards to a mere skeleton and set up a bewildering post-imperial bureaucracy. It was the fascists who benefited from this process, as in Austria and other European countries they took over a ready-made apparatus of repression, surveillance and classification of citizens. Stalin, meanwhile, provided the model for Hitler to follow – there was even a wing of the Nazi movement called the "National Bolsheviks" who favoured an alliance between the Reich and the USSR, and took the "socialist" element in "National Socialism" most seriously. The Capitalist West, in this period, lost its nerve, and failed to see the two totalitarianisms as evils to be fought equally, and so it lost its ethics and sense of direction. This is happening again today, and on a wider, more devastating scale.