Is a mass-produced jerk chicken burger a symbol of cultural appropriation or a celebration of British multiculturalism? This is an old debate that periodically resurfaces and so it was a couple of weeks ago when McDonald’s launched its latest festive offering.
In this case, a story that got echoed across much of the tabloid press was constructed out of a few random comments criticising McDonald’s on social media; it was journalists who built and amplified this narrative. But occasionally, others who should know better get drawn in, such as the MP who picked a fight with Jamie Oliver over his jerk rice.
I have long thought that reducing debates about racism to flippant questions about fast-food burgers and supermarket curry kits is damaging to the antiracist cause. But new research on public attitudes to racism by the Runnymede Trust and Voice4Change England helps us understand why.
The study is all the better for shunning mass polling as the primary way of understanding how the public thinks about race. Instead, researchers undertook two one-hour conversations with 60 people from a range of backgrounds. What emerges is both good and bad news for those of us who care deeply about ending racism. The good news is that the weight of public thinking is that racism matters, that it is something that is learnt and education has an important role to play; also, that racism is part of our national history.
The less good news is that some people buy into the idea that racism is "natural", that we all have an affinity with people who look more like us. There is a lack of understanding about the nature of structural racism; public thinking gravitates towards the idea that racism is about individual actions and responsibilities. There is a strong sense that there is no going backwards and that things will inevitably get better over time.
Yet in the 20 years since the Macpherson report, black people have gone from being five to nine times more likely to be stopped and searched by police than white people. And there is a strand of zero-sum thinking: the worry that tackling racial discrimination will inevitably mean majority groups giving things up.
Importantly, researchers found people hold beliefs that would be considered both warm and hostile to antiracism campaigns: it is possible for someone to believe both that racism is ingrained in human nature and will never change, but that we are making progress as a society, or that it is important we all do something about racism while at the same time worrying about the consequences for themselves.
The populist Right is very good at activating the more hostile strands of thinking by stoking this idea that if a minority benefits, the majority must lose. When Conservative MP Ben Bradley calls the education of white, working-class boys a "taboo" subject, he implies that white, working-class children have been unfairly overlooked by people more interested in promoting the interests of minority children; if it were Asian or black children, "heads would roll", he says (the lack of accountability for institutional racism in the Met suggests they wouldn’t).
By confecting this into a conflict between white and non-white children, he conveniently obscures the role of class. Far from being taboo, the class attainment gap for poor children, the vast majority of whom are white, was one of the key drivers of Labour education policy, which on any objective measure was far better than what followed, including Conservative chancellors slashing thousands of pounds a year in tax credits from parents in low-paid work and Tory education reforms that have done little to address the fact that working-class children remain far less likely to attend a good quality school.
The intellectual underpinnings of this zero-sum thinking lie in notions of "white identity" from academics such as Eric Kaufmann. Kaufmann argues that the rise of Right populism is primarily the product of white communities’ opposition to increasing racial diversity. He attacks the notion that structural racism exists at all and encourages politicians to promote the need to maintain "white culture".
But this is to take far too simplistic and patronising a view of the way white, working-class communities think about race. It cannot account for all the historical examples where a predominantly white labour movement built solidarity and common cause with campaigns for equality.
The Runnymede research shows that there are strands of public thinking that the Right can activate to achieve its ends of sowing division.
But there are also positive ways of thinking about race that antiracist campaigners can connect with and build on, sometimes in the same person and certainly within the same community. In particular, antiracism campaigners need to find ways to explain the often counterintuitive idea that racism is not just about individuals but systems.
"We need to communicate to people that racism is something that’s designed into our system, which means we can design something better," Sanjiv Lingayah, the lead author of the research, says.
But there are also traps. Certain ideas risk playing into the damaging idea that majority white and minority interests are directly in conflict, which antiracism campaigners need to challenge. Cultural appropriation often fits into that category, as do terms such as "white privilege" and "white fragility". Yes, there is an overall structural advantage to being white compared with being non-white, but, no, it does not build solidarity to imply that if you are white, you are automatically "privileged". Yes, men who went to Eton may have to loosen their grip on the levers of power, but that would, frankly, be good for all the rest of us.
This research gets us away from reductivist, static accounts of public attitudes to race.
It shows that, while there are aspects of public thinking that antiracists need to challenge, there is also a lot of positive stuff to work with. But to get lured into giving the impression that this is a fight between "them" and "us" is only to serve the agenda of the populist Right. — Guardian News
- Sonia Sodha is the Observer’s chief leader writer and a columnist.
