Public Meeting: Why “the others” stay “the others”

Public Meeting – all welcome

In a world full of cultural exchange and international trade, racism is a wide-spread ideology. What might seem like a contradiction, in fact fits really well.

While a rejection of racism is widespread amongst the left, it is mainly restricted to an opposition to judging people on the basis of a racist hierarchy. While this is part of the story, a central quality of racism is left out: racism is about essentialising people, determining behaviour, belonging or taste by somebody’s “cultural background”. This racist essentialising is also common amongst the left, and it is part of the problem.

The analysis of racism on the left often focusses on the social institutions that seem to spread the ideology: the state and capital. The state is racist, e.g., by deporting people or by stop and search. Capital is racist by paying some people less than others, by not considering some for “more advanced” positions or not employing them at all.

Whilst all of this deserves critique, the question is whether racism as an ideology can be properly understood and explained this way. We do not think it can: capital does not create racism, its first and foremost interest is economic performance. Sure, capital simply and brutally uses racism not the least as a means of suppressing wages, and so does capital with any other difference amongst people – differences produced by social conditions or not. That is, capital exploits racism, but racism is not in the world because of this.

The state on the other hand declares in its laws that it intends to treat its citizens equally regardless of “race”. Where the state does make a distinction is between citizens and foreigners. Which category one falls into is determined by one’s passport, not one’s skin tone. However, while democratic states provide the acquisition of citizenship through having the right lineage as one part of their nationality laws, this is not what people usually mean when they talk about racism as a fundamental feature of the state.

This is neither a compliment to capital nor the state, but it indicates that the reasons for the success of the racist ideology have to be found somewhere else. We claim that what makes racism so successful is its compatibility with nationalism. We also want to present and discuss how racism nevertheless fits with government policies, and why various government bodies, at the same time, want no self-administered justice by racists – and why indeed racism in the heads of so many has its basis in the material and objective foundations of this society.