Racism is the exposure of a certain part of the population to premature death. Prof. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Director of Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, The City University of New York.
L’appel des camps, Street Art, bâtiment de la “Tour Paris 13”, avant destruction dans le cadre d’une opération de rénovation urbaine. Jeanne Menjoulet/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND
“He died like a dog”, said President Donald Trump on October 27, 2019, at the press conference where he announced that US Special Forces had killed Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
These cruel words could have been uttered to the same gloating effect by early 1900s Ku Klux Klan leaders coming back after a night of lynching African-Americans in the Deep South. The next day at a political rally, Trump cinematically mimicked the sound of the guns used: “Boom, boom, boom! They were out there, perfect.” Without evidence, he claimed that the terrorist leader had been “whimpering and crying and screaming all the way”, thus glorifying an extra-judicial killing.
Two days later in France, in yet another national drama over the hijab), the Senate was meeting to adopt a bill prohibiting mothers wearing the Islamic headscarf to take part in school trips.
In between these two events, a former candidate of the right-wing National Front party, inspired by a conspiracy theory, shot two people in front of a mosque in southwest France to “avenge” the fire at Notre Dame cathedral – one that has been determined to be accidental.
Two weeks earlier, in the Saxony region of Germany, a man had tried to set off explosives in a synagogue and opened fire on passers-by. The previous month, a wave of violence against African immigrants swept through South Africa resulting in the death of 12 people.
The same month, a Hispanic man in Milwaukee, Wisconsin had acid thrown on his face and told to “go back to [his] country”. And in Italy, Liliana Segre, an 89-year-old Holocaust survivor, was provided with police protection as a result of threats she received following her call for parliament to set up a committee to combat racism.
While all these events could be examined in isolation, what if the current racisms were somehow connected?
Survivor and senator Liliana Segre speaks about the Holocaust.
“People like to think that their nationalism is not as ugly as someone else’s nationalism.”@Elif_Safak is in Studio B with Wole Soyinka this week. The full episode airs on Friday 22nd Nov!#StudioBUnscriptedpic.twitter.com/2pMtwZ2PWe
Racism is a phenomenon that, in its various manifestations, traveled beyond national frontiers with colonial conquests long before the birth of the nation-state. Racial hierarchies have always been part of imperial domination, and these hierarchies are not an exclusively Western phenomenon.
Yet over the past 200 years, race became an element defining the nation. Racism was used in the imperial metropolis to justify the mission to civilise, and also useful in small, noncolonial nation-states. There, it was a handy marker of distinction differentiating the Swiss from the Austrian or the Swede from the Dane.
What was and still is global is the idea that races exist and that racists believe their own to be superior to others. If the international system and its community had truly moved beyond nation-states and sovereignty, racists would need to reinvent themselves and their objective enemies. Still, an evolving global dimension of 21st-century racism is already discernible.
The timeless nature of racism
Book-ended by the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the 2016 US presidential election, with the Mediterranean migrant crisis of 2014 in between, the global resurgence in racism and discrimination has accelerated. The contemporary projection of discrimination is merely replaying familiar dynamics of dehumanisation, dispossession, denial, and demonisation that have long existed across the world and among societies.
Similarly, many of the current episodes of racism – in their expression, analysis or representation – establish an overt link with earlier forms. In many places, the perception is that racism is a passé issue. Would that it were so. The United States have not been able to solve their racial question, nor has France resolved its colonial legacy, and the murmur of antisemitism in Europe has continued since World War II – to name but three examples.
Trumpian racism
Amid these diffusions, the Trumpian racism emerging today has three unifying characteristics:
An internationalised form of expression whereby racists echo each other’s views and actions in global unison.
A deepened normalisation of the practice with societies seemingly less and less troubled by the issue and its rationalisation.
A weaponisation of discrimination, where ideas, discourse, behaviour, laws, and institutions come to be aligned against others.
In and of themselves, none of these dimensions is novel. Rather, it is their combination, expansion and loosened expression that are enabling the current rebooting of racism in a more insidious form than the earlier colonial, segregation or Apartheid configurations.
Within nations, racism continues to be reenacted within specific scapegoating narratives. The Black, the Brown, the Yellow, the Muslim, the Jew, the Latino, the migrant, the foreigner are the single reason why things are “not good”, allowing xenophobia to be invited in.
Racists now observe each other, reach out to each other and at times work to build alliances such as the recent “boot camp” organised by Steve Bannon in an Italian monastery (which eventually evicted him). In this real and virtual territory, racisms once disconnected now finds common ground. In Brazil, Israel, and the Philippines, individuals and governments fuel their discourses and actions and magnify the global broadcast of their causes.
Nordic Media Days 2019 headlined Steve Bannon, for 2020 they might do Stephen Miller?
Whereas the current racisms reinforce each other in this fashion, constituencies opposed to racism are still equally anchored in national contexts but they do not find an equivalent transnational strength. International organisations seem particularly ill-equipped to react to the deepening international racist drift. While racists around the world find ways to fuel the fires of hatred, those who stand against racism keep fighting against it using ineffective weapons. This is so because the approach is bureaucratic and declamatory, and leadership and substance are missing.
A further phenomenon characterising the revived racism is its weaponisation. Presidents, prime ministers, political party leaders, elected officials, intellectuals and media personalities increasingly use openly racist language in a casual, nonchalant way, as Donald Trump has consistently done.
As the dynamic takes hold, the notion of whiteness has also been weaponised. In the United States in recent years, individuals have been calling the police agencies to denounce people engaging in what are in fact innocuous activities. In many of these cases, officers reacted by de facto taking the side of the (White) people calling them and approached the cases as if the “reported” (Black or Brown) individuals were suspicious, instead of holding those responsible for abusive use of the 911 system.
This Kafkaesque phenomenon – the epitome of the routinised and martialised racism today – is striking, as the nature of these calls has expanded to include the most mundane activities. The process is insidious: that officers can claim to be merely responding to a citizen’s call betrays the problematic nature of a system protecting individuals’ racist whims while violating the rights of their victims.
It is in such a context where the global invocation of the term terrorism and the internationalised normalised stigmatisation of Muslims can allow for modern-day genocide and large-scale repression in Myanmar and China with minimal engagement on the part of the international community, including Muslim states such as Saudi Arabia.
In these cases, and in Kashmir, the post-9/11 hostility toward Islam has been instrumentalised by authoritarian regimes to repress their own populations
Another example of this travelling racism is the post-Apartheid anti-African xenophobia in South Africa. As Achille Mbembe remarks, referencing Frantz Fanon, South African forms of black nationalism are morphing into virulent forms of black-on-black racism. An ethno-racial project, this new form has forged two enemies for itself, one it fears and envies (whiteness or white monopoly capital) and another it loathes and despises (black people from elsewhere).
Here it is not merely the rhythms of discrimination – spelling flare-ups of cycles of neo-Nazism and neo-fascism – that matter here but how familiar motifs are acquiring new-found resonance.
In their ground-breaking 1971 conversation, “A Rap on Race”, the novelist James Baldwin and the anthropologist Margaret Mead captured the at-once raw and urgent, elusive and slow, intimate and public nature of racism. As Baldwin remarks at the start of the discussion:
“It is as though some great, great, great wound is in the whole body, and no one dares to operate: to close it, to examine it, to stitch it.”
Close to half a century later, the operating has not taken place and the wound is still there – for all to see now.
