Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race(29)

In 1968, the late Conservative politician Enoch Powell told a rapt audience in a speech about the ills of immigration: ‘In this country in fifteen or twenty years’ time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.’1 Inadvertently, he revealed his own tacit recognition of racist power relations in the country at the time, and although he didn’t explicitly say it (because he knew what side he was on), Powell clearly thought that a power transfer in race relations would lead to white British people facing the mistreatment and systemic barriers that black people were working to overcome. There is a reason why he said ‘whip hand over’ rather than using the less symbolic phrasing ‘advantage over’. Whip conjures images of beatings, misery and forced labour, of subjugation and total dominance – of slavery. Enoch Powell’s speech has consistently been earmarked as one of the most racist speeches in British history, but his language was only as racially charged as Britain’s relationship with blackness has historically been. The only way he could envision power being maintained in Britain was by subjugation of a people, because that is how Britain has held and maintained its power in the past.

The projection of an ever-encroaching black doomsday is what I call ‘fear of a black planet’. It’s a fear that the alienated ‘other’ will take over. Enoch Powell’s fears of a flipped script have lived on in modern-day political rhetoric on immigration. When, in the run-up to the 2015 general election, the Labour Party released official merchandise which included a mug that read ‘controls on immigration’, they played into that fear. Some insist that we are living on a tiny island and it’s time to shut the doors. There is a worry the ever-disappearing essence of Britishness is being slowly eroded by immigrants whose sole interest is not to flee from war or poverty, but to destroy the social fabric of the country.

The fear takes on many guises. We hear it in the form of ‘concerns about’ immigration, touted by political parties in recent general elections. We hear it in the form of ‘preserving our national identity’. At the core of the fear is the belief that anything that doesn’t represent white homogeneity exists only to erase it. That multiculturalism is the start of a slippery slope towards the destruction of Western civilisation.

It seemed borderline paranoid when UKIP’s Nigel Farage2 expressed a nervousness at hearing fellow passengers speak different languages in his train carriage. In a 2014 speech, he said, ‘The fact [is] that in scores of our cities and market towns, this country in a short space of time has frankly become unrecognisable. Whether it is the impact on local schools and hospitals, whether it is the fact in many parts of England you don’t hear English spoken any more. This is not the kind of community we want to leave to our children and grandchildren.’3

Decades after Enoch Powell’s speech, and the fear of a black planet has in no way subsided. The word multiculturalism has become a proxy for a ton of British anxieties about immigration, race, difference, crime and danger. It’s now a dirty word, a front word for fears about black and brown and foreign people posing a danger to white Brits. If you are an immigrant – even if you’re second or third generation – this is personal. You are multiculturalism. People who are scared of multiculturalism are scared of you. And, in the spirit of 1980s-style political blackness, ‘immigration concerns’ are less about who is black, and more about who isn’t white British.

In campaign literature for the referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, the Vote Leave campaign wrote that ‘there were 475,000 live births to mothers from other EU countries between 2005 and 2014, the equivalent of adding a city the size of Manchester to the population.’4 This was cloaked in a conversation about the ‘strain’ immigrants put on the NHS, but I’ve heard this discussion before. In the US, the phrase ‘anchor baby’ is used in the pejorative sense to admonish US-born children of immigrants. It suggests a takeover. Britain is not innocent of this kind of punitive talk. In 2016, one hospital began considering passport checks for non-emergency patients – including pregnant women – before they received treatment.5 In more campaign literature before the referendum, posters from UKIP read: ‘We want our country back: Vote to Leave’.6 The last time I heard the slogan ‘we want our country back’ was in my university town, when far-right group the English Defence League were staging a protest about what they called the ‘Islamification’ of Britain. Now, another form of the phrase – ‘taking our country back’ – is used as a strapline by Britain First. An IPSOS Mori poll published days before the EU referendum vote confirmed that immigration was the top issue for would-be leave voters.7 What was once fringe is now mainstream.

This is nothing new. For a long time now, far-right political groups have hijacked the anti-colonial struggles of native people in America and Australia to create a story of the embattled indigenous white British, under siege from immigration. Around the same time the English Defence League were marching through my university town, a group of my friends crowded into my student bedroom to watch former British National Party leader Nick Griffin on BBC Question Time. I watched in disbelief as he said: ‘No one here would dare go to New Zealand and say to a Maori “what do you mean indigenous?” You wouldn’t dare go to North America and say to an American Red Indian “what do you mean indigenous? We’re all the same.”’ He continued: ‘The indigenous people of these islands, the English, the Scots, the Irish and the Welsh . . . it’s the people who have been here overwhelmingly for the last 17,000 years. We are the aboriginals here . . . The simple fact is that the majority of the British people are descended from people who’ve lived here since time immemorial. It’s extraordinarily racist, it is genuinely racist when you seek to deny the English. You people wouldn’t even let us have our name on the census form. That is racism. And that’s why people are voting British National Party.’