Racism in Britain Collection
As the UK grapples with a wave of racist protests, we've compiled a selection of articles and chapters exploring contemporary racism, structural and institutional discrimination, whiteness, shame and othering, as well as the intersection of migration and race. To access more content from our subject collections, consider asking your librarian to sign up for a free trial.
Racism in Britain Collection
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This article aims to explore the appeal of racist narratives and how they are used in populist politics to manipulate and exploit, leading to a rise in xenophobia and race hate crimes. Beneath the surface of the rhetoric is a predictable constellation of thoughts and feelings that create a racist imagination whose emotional atmosphere is melancholic and potentially murderous. The entangling of grief with racism is exploited through political messaging which aims to create false narratives of hope that attempt to bring to life a regressive fantasy of a return to an idealised past, into the material reality of the present by racialising others and treating them with impunity. I consider the extent to which we can learn about the challenges of engaging with these forces by turning to the experience of working clinically with these states of mind to translate a psychoanalytic sensibility to the political, one that is sensitive to the complexity and conflation of race, class and biography.
The persistence of racism is explored intersectionally, through a personal narrative or herstory, which includes extracts of childhood, professional experiences within forensic mental health services, and in relation to group analytic roles. Reflections are underpinned by two theories; Freud’s seminal theory of trauma as an unlaid ghost and Foulkes’s group analytic premise that human beings are permeated to the core with social context, including that which is transgenerationally transmitted. Thus, it is proposed that racial trauma may be thought about as an unlaid ghost of Empire, the dynamics of which are continuously re-enacted during interactions between people and, it is suggested, can be understood as internal working models laid down at an unconscious level and arguably integrated within our attachment systems. Hence, the emergence of racist attitudes and behaviour during intense attachment experiences, whether personal, group or societal in origin.
Why do some people racially abuse others? In this article, I revisit fieldwork conducted in the early 2000s in Stoke-on-Trent in North Staffordshire with people implicated in racially harassment and racially aggravated crimes. I consider how Keval’s (2024) concept of a ‘haunting melody of loss’ can be used to capture the psychosocial dynamics apparent among people who directed their animosity towards migrant and minority ethnic groups in the midst of their own experiences of loss of face, reputation, health, financial security, control and a sense of community. The article contemplates how such dynamics subsequently became more pervasive features of the British political land, capitalised on by parties of the political right and far-right in the decade that followed. It also invites psychosocial reflections on the harms caused to migrant and minority ethnic populations demonised, misleadingly, as to blame for the losses of encountered by large sections of the ethnic majority white population and notes the enduring dangers cultivated by misdirecting the grief of loss posed by populist politics.
The introduction draws attention to the paradoxical nature of the relationship between law and racial justice, highlighting how the law can be used to both help and hinder the struggle for racial justice. We might assume that the legal system will be allied to the idea of racial justice because it is said to be underpinned by the principles of neutrality and fairness, and there are various Acts of Parliament that appear to give effect to these principles such as the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Equality Act 2010. However, there are examples of law failing to advance racial justice and sometimes facilitating racial injustices. The Introduction sets out the central contention of this book: that there are historical, cultural, and systemic reasons for the limits of law.
This research explored how staff and families using a Scottish trauma-informed charity, striving to enact antiracism, understand and approach race and antiracism in services for families of colour. Thematic analysis was applied to data from ten interviews with six staff participants and four families. Six interlinking themes emerged. Staff identified the charity as a ‘white organisation’ and sought ‘a common frame of reference’ with families, while families expressed overwhelming ‘gratitude’ to staff. ‘Identities were owned and disowned’, with participants using ‘colour-blind’ racial ideologies. Staff ‘located responsibility’ for bridging cultural gaps in families of colour. White staff, while well-intentioned, did not express a fundamental understanding of racism, impeding their ability to enact antiracism. This reflected wider Scottish policy and lay beliefs of being a post-racist society, and challenged organisational attempts to fully embody trauma-informed practice. Challenges and recommendations for researching racism in the third sector are discussed.
Chapter 1’s Introduction comprises an overview of contradictions between colour-coded racism and the contemporary postracial turn in Britain. This Introduction explains why this book takes Critical Race Theorist Derrick Bell’s ‘racial realism’ as the starting point for critiquing Britain’s postracialism. Bell’s anti-utopian critique of liberal race equality saw struggles for racial justice embedded in a permanent cycle of progress and regression: a cycle that would not be readily relinquished. Subsequent CRT analyses have argued that one of the most effective ways of maintaining racism as a means of structuring power is through colourblind, postracial discourses and policies that allow the simultaneous disavowal of crude racism and the rearticulation of racism in more subtle forms.
This chapter discusses Britain’s attachment to facile models of postracialism and the dominant desire for the phenomenological disappearance of problems of race and racism. These have produced a contemporary state postracialism: a kind of ‘really existing postracialism’, in which ‘anything but racism’ explanations of social inequality dominate, and in which Britain’s non-racist self-image is a cover for minimising the lived experiences of communities of colour. The chapter argues that analyses of postracialism in Britain should draw upon lessons from Black Atlantic scholarship, including CRT.
With Social Policy’s rich academic history of analysing the causes and impacts of inequality, it might be expected that concepts of race and ethnicity sit firmly in the centre of the discipline. Surprisingly, however, this axis of inequality is somewhat peripheral within contemporary Social Policy, despite popular recognition of concepts such as institutional racism. Using a critical realist-informed approach, this chapter argues that for Social Policy to be more equipped to analyse inequalities associated with race and ethnicity, the discipline needs to develop a broader conceptual base. This may include looking at concepts more readily associated with other disciplines and, in doing so, place it in a better position to recognise government’s actions and policies as indicative of a broader political and ideological landscape.
Over the past few decades, the role of race and racism in contemporary football cultures has been an issue that has attracted both scholarly and policy interest. In this chapter, the focus is on the evolution in the ways these issues have been analysed. Although much early research focused on the image of the racist football hooligan as the subject of concern, we have seen more efforts in the period since the 2000s to engage with the wider bodies of scholarship on race, ethnicity and national identity. The chapter begins by providing an overview of the background to the process of race making in football cultures. I then move on to discuss the impact of these processes of race making on Black players and supporters. This then allows us to return to the example of the events surrounding the UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) European Football Championship in 2020 in order to analyse the important role that the England national team plays in the formation of ideas about race and national identity in the contemporary environment. In the final part of the chapter, I touch on the need to include antiracism in any rounded analysis of this issue and conclude by exploring what the account in this chapter tells us about the changing role of race and racism in contemporary football cultures.
In this article, we present empirical evidence on the cognitive processes underlying racist beliefs and judgement. We draw on 47 life history interviews with former members of White supremacist groups to better understand how social interactions and stimuli from the wider environment inform cognitive pathways or how people think. While we examine both deliberate and intuitive pathways to racist belief, we focus on the intuitive ways that extreme racist beliefs are cognitively processed before, during and after an individual is involved in the White supremacist movement. In doing so, we fill a critical gap in the literature by providing an empirical analysis of intuition. We illustrate the analytic contributions of our approach, and we conclude by drawing on our evidence to elucidate three puzzles, including: (1) why racist beliefs persist; (2) how people draw on implicit beliefs to make explicit judgements; and (3) how explicit beliefs become encoded in intuitive pathways.
