In which John Sentamu loses my respect

He isnt a decent person, he is a wicked, nasty bigot. Why are you so impressed by his “anti-racism”? He selfishly only cares about white on black racism, not the racism practised by blacks on whites. This is very prevalent (I know from personal experience) but is ignored by “liberals” because most victims are the lower class whites whom they despise.

The difference is that white people are the dominant, privileged group in our society, so discrimination against whites does not reinforce an existing pattern of injustice and oppression, whereas discrimination against people of colour does. Read this article by Tim Wise as an explanation of why the two things are not equivalent.

”
I don’t think it is the role of the state to define what marriage is.”

Yes you do.

white people are the dominant, privileged group in our society

No, rich white liberals and their ethnic minority allies are the dominant, privileged group.  The white working class are disenfranchised.

Headline: Gang freed over attack because they were ‘not used to being drunk’

Subhead:  A gang of four women who repeatedly kicked a care worker in the head have walked free from court after a judge heard they were ‘not used to being drunk’.

Copy:  ”Sisters Ambaro Maxamed, 24, Ayan Maxamed, 28, and Hibo Maxamed, 24, and their cousin Ifrah Nur, 28, admitted causing Rhea Page actual bodily harm – a charge which can carry a five-year jail sentence. 
However, while Judge Robert Brown acknowledged the attack was ‘ugly’, he handed the group suspended sentences after hearing that, being Muslim, they were not used to drinking.‘They were taking turns to kick me. I was lying on the ground the whole time, crying and screaming. It was terrifying. I thought they were going to kill me.’ Ms Page said her assailants screamed ‘kill the white slag’ while kicking her in the head as her boyfriend Lewis Moore, 23, tried to fight them off after a night out in Leicester in June last year. 
She suffered bruises and grazes to her head, back, legs and arms, and had clumps of hair pulled out, Leicester crown court heard. 
The 22-year-old, who was left so traumatised she lost her job due to repeated absences with stress, labelled the sentence ‘disgusting’. 
Mr Moore was accused of using ‘violence’ to restrain the attackers but even Gary Short, mitigating for Ambaro Mazamad, said ‘it doesn’t justify their behaviour’. 
‘They’re Somalian Muslims and alcohol or drugs isn’t something they’re used to,’ he added. 
As well as their six-month sentences, suspended for a year, Hibo Maxamed received a four-month curfew between 9pm and 6am, while the others were ordered to carry out 150 hours of unpaid work.”

Notice the attackers were not charged with racial aggravation, as they would have been if they had been white and the victim a Somali Muslim.  And if the attackers had been white and the victim a Somali Muslim, you can be sure the headline & subhead would have read something like: White girl gang in vile racist assault on defenceless Muslim woman “Kill the black bitch!” they screamed while kicking their victim in the head.

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No, rich white liberals and their ethnic minority allies are the
dominant, privileged group.  The white working class are
disenfranchised.

No. This is a misunderstanding of what we mean by “privilege“, in the context of the sociology of race and gender.

It’s important to understand that the same person can be privileged in some respects and not in others. A white person may, indeed, be discriminated against for being working-class and of a low socio-economic status; for being a woman; for being openly gay or lesbian; for being transgendered; for having a physical or mental disability; or any number of other characteristics that are stigmatized or discriminated-against in our society. It’s certainly true that the working class, regardless of ethnicity, are marginalized in comparison with their middle-class counterparts.

But the difference is that white people are not systematically oppressed for being white. I don’t doubt that there are instances of racial discrimination against whites, but they pale in historical frequency to the long and shameful history of institutionalized racism against other ethnic groups in Western society, from historical slavery and colonialism to today’s racist immigration laws. Again, read the Tim Wise article for an explanation, or Peggy McIntosh’s famous essay on white privilege.

As I see it, there are three problems with this model of ‘privilege’.

i.)  Privilege is not monolithic.  As you yourself admit, people are ‘disprivileged’ for many reasons – on account of their class, age, sex, appearance, intellect, opinions, etc.  Why is race assumed to trump all these in the privilege stakes?  A white employer might, on account of prejudice, hire a white man rather than a better-qualified black man.  But if the same employer lived in, say, Glasgow, he might favour a black man with a Glaswegian accent over a better-qualified white man with a posh English accent. In some UK cities an  employer might favour an job applicant whose clothing marks him out as a fellow Muslim.  If the employer works for the BBC, he might prefer an applicant with a copy of Prospect magazine under his arm to a rival applicant with the Spectator.  All these instances of personal prejudice could be seen as  exemplifying wider yet localised  systemic structures of privilege.  Isn’t it the case that any society will exhibit numerous overlapping and intersecting zones of privilege any one of which, depending on circumstances, might take pre-eminence?

ii.)  Privilege cannot always be equated with power, nor does it always take precedence over  power.  The white woman in the newspaper article I transcribed might or might not be privileged in respect of her black female attackers, but she was in fact powerless against them.

 iii.)  The most interesting part of the incident described in that newspaper article is not the fact that the black Muslim attackers used a racial epithet against their victim.  It’s that the judge didn’t see fit to regard this as a ‘racially aggravated’ assault.  When one contrasts this dog that didn’t bark to the hounding of Emma West or John Terry, one begins to wonder just who has the ‘privilege’ in our society.  It’s also interesting that you felt no need to qualify  your reference to “historical slavery”  by acknowledging that the white European trade in African slaves, albeit abominable, was dwarfed in magnitude and duration by the Arab Muslim trade in both African and white European slaves.  Or by mentioning that, unlike the Muslim corsairs, the white slavers  didn’t typically descend on foreign shores and forcibly abduct their victims – they depended on the complicity of  African chieftains like the king of Dahomy, who provided slaves in exchange for goods. These omissions serve to reinforce the notion that “historical slavery” was exclusively a matter of “white guilt” rather than a combination of “white guilt”, “Arab Muslim guilt” and “African guilt”.  And I would venture to say that omissions like these routinely occur because the dominant – privilieged – discourse in our society is not that of “whites” (as it may have been once upon a time) but of  a clerisy of ethnomasochisic white liberals and their ethnic minority allies.

Speaking of “Uncle Tim” Wise, did you see this piece he wrote a while back?

For all y’all rich folks, enjoy that champagne, or whatever fancy ass Scotch you drink.

And for y’all a bit lower on the economic scale, enjoy your Pabst Blue Ribbon, or whatever shitty ass beer you favor.

Whatever the case, and whatever your economic station, know this…

You need to drink up.

And quickly.

And heavily.

Because your time is limited.

Real damned limited.

So party while you can, but mind the increasingly loud clock ticking away in the corners of your consciousness.

The clock that reminds you how little time you and yours have left.

Not much more now.

Tick, tock.

Tick, tock.

Tick.

Tock.

I know, you think you’ve taken “your country back” with this election — and of course you have always thought it was yours for the taking, cuz that’s what we white folks are bred to believe, that it’s ours, and how dare anyone else say otherwise — but you are wrong.

You have won a small battle in a larger war the meaning of which you do not remotely understand.

‘Cuz there is nothing even slightly original about you.

There have always been those who wanted to take the country back.

There were those who, in past years, wanted to take the country back to a time of enslavement and indentured servitude.

But they lost.

There were those who wanted to take us back to a time when children could be made to work in mines and factories, when workers had no legal rights to speak of, when the skies in every major city were heavy with industrial soot that would gather on sidewalks and windowsills like volcanic ash.

But they lost.

There were those who wanted to take us back to a time when women could not vote, or attend any but a few colleges, or get loans in their own names, or start their own businesses.

But they lost.

There were those who wanted to take us back to a time when blacks “had no rights that the white man was bound to respect,” – this being the official opinion of the Supreme Court before those awful days of judicial activism, now decried by the likes of you – and when people of color could legally be kept from voting solely because of race, or holding certain jobs, or living in certain neighborhoods, or run out of other towns altogether when the sun would go down, or be strung up from trees.

But they lost.

And you will lose.

So make a note of it.

Tweet it to yourself.

Put it on your Facebook wall and leave it there so you’ll remember that I told you so.

It is coming, and soon.

This isn’t hubris. It isn’t ideology. It is not wishful thinking.

It is math.

Not even advanced math. Just simple, basic, like 3rd grade math.

The kind of math that proves how your kind — mostly older white folks beholden to an absurd, inaccurate, nostalgic fantasy of what America used to be like — are dying.

You’re like the bad guy in every horror movie ever made, who gets shot five times, or stabbed ten, or blown up twice, and who will eventually pass — even if it takes four sequels to make it happen — but who in the meantime keeps coming back around, grabbing at our ankles as we walk by, we having been mistakenly convinced that you were finally dead this time.

Fair enough, and have at it. But remember how this movie ends.

Our ankles survive.

You do not.

Michael Meyers, Freddie Kreuger, Jason, and that asshole husband in that movie with Julia Roberts who tracks her down after she runs away and changes her identity–they are all done. Even that crazy fucker in Saw is about to be finished off for good. Granted, he’s gonna be popping out in some 3-D shit to scare the kiddies, so he isn’t going quietly. But he’s going, as all bad guys eventually do.

And in the pantheon of American history, old white people have pretty much always been the bad guys, the keepers of the hegemonic and reactionary flame, the folks unwilling to share the category of American with others on equal terms.

Fine, keep it up. It doesn’t matter.

Because you’re on the endangered list.

And unlike, say, the bald eagle or some exotic species of muskrat, you are not worth saving.

In forty years or so, maybe fewer, there won’t be any more white people around who actually remember that Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, Opie-Taylor-Down-at-the-Fishing Hole cornpone bullshit that you hold so near and dear to your heart.

There won’t be any more white folks around who think the 1950s were the good old days, because there won’t be any more white folks around who actually remember them, and so therefore, we’ll be able to teach about them accurately and honestly, without hurting your precious feelings, or those of the so-called “greatest generation” — a bunch whose white members were by and large a gaggle of miscreants who helped save the world from fascism only to return home and oppose the ending of it here, by doing nothing to lift a finger on behalf of the civil rights struggle.

So to hell with you and all who revere you.

By then, half the country will be black or brown. And there is nothing you can do about it.

Nothing, Senõr Tancredo.

Nothing, Senõra Angle, or Senõra Brewer, or Senõr Beck.

Loy tiene muy mal, hijo de Puta.

And by then you will have gone all in as a white nationalist movement — hell you’ve all but done that now — thus guaranteeing that the folks of color, and even a decent size minority of us white folks will be able to crush you, election after election, from the Presidency on down to the 8th grade student council.

Like I said, this shit is math, baby. And numbers don’t lie.

Bottom line, this too shall pass.

So enjoy your tax cuts a while longer.

Go buy whatever you people buy when your taxes get cut: a new car or two, a bigger house, an island. Whatever.

Go back to trading your derivatives, engaging in rampant financial speculation that produces nothing of value, that turns the whole world into your personal casino. Whatever.

Play your hand, and for the love of God play it big. Real big. As in, shoot for the moon big. As in, try to privatize Social Security, and health care, and everything else. Whatever.

At least that way everyone will be able to see what you’re really about.

We’ve been trying to tell them, but nothing beats seeing it with your own eyes, so “Go big or go home,” Bubba.

“Git ‘er Done.”

“Cowboy up,” or whatever other stupid-ass catch phrase strikes your fancy.

Just promise you’ll do more than talk this time.

Please, or as one of your celluloid heroes might put it, “make my day.”

Do whatever you gotta do, but remember that those who are the victims of your greed and indifference take the long view.

They know, but you do not, that justice is not for the sprinters, but rather for the long distance runners who will be hitting their second wind, right about the time that you collapse from exhaustion.

They are like the tortoise to your hare.

They are like the San Francisco Giants, to your New York Yankees: a bunch that loses year after year after year, until they finally win.

You have had this confidence before, remember?

You thought you had secured your position permanently after the overthrow of reconstruction in the wake of the civil war, after the elimination of the New Deal, after the Reagan revolution, after the Republican electoral victory of 1994. And yet, they who refuse to die are still here.

Because those who have lived on the margins, who have been abused, maligned, targeted by austerity measures and budget cuts, subjected to racism, classism, sexism, straight supremacy and every other form of oppression always know more about their abusers than the abusers know about their victims.

They have to study you, to pay careful attention, to adjust their body armor accordingly, and to memorize your sleep patterns.

You, on the other hand, need know nothing whatsoever about them. And this, will surely prove fatal to you in the end. For it means you will not know their resolve. Will not fear it, as you should.

It means you will take their greatest strength — perseverance — and make of it a weakness, called losing.

But what you forget, or more to the point never knew, is that those who lose know how to lose, which is to say they know how to lose with dignity.

And those who suffer know how to suffer, which is to say they know how to survive: a skill that is in short supply amid the likes of you.

You, who could not survive the thought of minimal health care reform, or financial regulation, or a marginal tax rate equal to that which you paid just 10 years earlier, perhaps are under the illusion that everyone is as weak as you, as soft as you, as akin to petulant children as you are, as unable to cope with the smallest setback, the slightest challenge to the way you think your country should look and feel, and operate.

But, surprise…they are not.

And they know how to regroup, and plot, and plan, and they are planning even now — we are — your destruction.

And I do not mean by that your physical destruction. We don’t play those games. We’re not into the whole “Second Amendment remedies, militia, armed resistance” bullshit that your side fetishizes, cuz, see, we don’t have to be. We don’t need guns.

We just have to be patient.

And wait for your hearts to stop beating.

And stop they will.

And for some of you, real damned soon, truth be told.

Do you hear it?

The sound of your empire dying? Your nation, as you knew it, ending, permanently?

Because I do, and the sound of its demise is beautiful.

So know this.

If you thought this election was payback for 2008, remember…

Payback, thy name is…

Temporary.

Privilege is not monolithic.  As you yourself admit, people are
‘disprivileged’ for many reasons – on account of their class, age, sex,
appearance, intellect, opinions, etc… Isn’t it the case that any society will exhibit numerous overlapping and
intersecting zones of privilege any one of which, depending on
circumstances, might take pre-eminence?

Yes, of course it’s true that privilege isn’t monolithic. Sociologists and activists have been taking account of this observation for a long time. This is what the concepts of intersectionality and kyriarchy are about. We live in a society which privileges various characteristics over others; but the same person may have some privileged characteristics and some non-privileged characteristics, and be a victim of some forms of discrimination but not others. A black heterosexual working-class man faces some forms of discrimination and not others; so too does a white middle-class lesbian woman. Similarly, it’s also true to say that there are multiple interlocking forms of prejudice and social hierarchy, operating at different levels of the social order. For instance, a Muslim LGBT person in Britain might be discriminated against in multiple contexts; xe may be a victim of homophobic prejudice within hir own community, and, simultaneously, a victim of anti-Muslim prejudice in society at large.

So this is not an argument against the concept of privilege. It’s something that people concerned with issues of inequality and social justice have been writing and talking about for a long time.

The most interesting part of the incident described in that newspaper
article is not the fact that the black Muslim attackers used a racial
epithet against their victim.  It’s that the judge didn’t see fit to
regard this as a ‘racially aggravated’ assault.

There is, in Western society, a major difference between the use of racial epithets against whites and against ethnic minorities: the latter reinforces an existing pattern of oppression, the other does not. I notice that, while handwaving about other things Tim Wise has written, you didn’t see fit to engage with the substance of what he wrote about the nonsense of “reverse racism”. See also here.

And I would venture to say that omissions like these routinely occur
because the dominant – privileged – discourse in our society is not that
of “whites” (as it may have been once upon a time) but of  a clerisy of
ethnomasochisic white liberals and their ethnic minority allies.

This is bullshit. (And “ethnomasochistic” is among the most meaningless words I’ve ever heard.)

Of course there’s a kernel of a point there: it is all too true that educated, affluent whites dominate the discourse, on the political left as much as on the political right, while the working classes have less of a voice. But it is certainly not true that a “clerisy” of “white liberals” dominate the discourse to the exclusion of right-wing and conservative voices. Far from it. Such a claim entirely ignores the influence of some of the most powerful opinion-formers on both sides of the Atlantic – wealthy and influential conservatives like Rupert Murdoch, Lord Rothermere, the Koch brothers, and so forth. The influence of the likes of the Guardian or Rachel Maddow, say, over public opinion tends to be rather less than that of the likes of the Daily Mail, the Sun, the Daily Express, Fox News, and so forth. Even in atheist circles, which one might expect to be more liberal than most, the likes of Pat Condell have a disturbing amount of influence. Everywhere one turns, there are influential and powerful right-wing voices decrying the evils of “political correctness” and “multiculturalism”. And in many places they’ve successfully tapped into the discontent of the post-industrial white working class, encouraging them to blame ethnic minorities and immigrants for their present economic woes (a scare tactic which has often been disturbingly successful throughout history, from the outbreaks of violence against the Jews and Flemings in medieval London to the nativist movement against the Irish in nineteenth-century America).

Present-day immigration, along similar lines, is demonized by the xenophobic Right in both Britain and America as something to be feared, and something that must be warded off by walls, border fences and more institutionalized violence against immigrants – leading in Britain to the creation of detention camps like Yarl’s Wood, and in America to thousands of avoidable and tragic deaths annually on the Mexican border, among other things. Meanwhile, the mainstream Left mostly stays remarkably quiet about the issue, because the xenophobes have succeeded in dominating the discourse. Whenever there is a major news story about immigration, even the “liberal” BBC will wheel out the vile Sir Andrew Green of “MigrationWatch”, the smiling and respectable face of xenophobia, to spew scare-stories about demographic time bombs, without anyone to rebut his claims. No one, save a few left-wing bloggers and Guardian columnists, ever talks about the horrors faced by asylum-seekers and refugees, or the real human cost of American and European “border security” policies. Your average white Middle Englander may well have an opinion about immigration, quite likely one of strident opposition, but xe is unlikely to recognize names like “Campsfield House” or “Frontex”, or to have any awareness of the horrors often faced by refugees and other migrants from the developing world arriving in Western countries.

While perhaps rather more inflammatory in style than I would personally have chosen, I see nothing objectionable about any of those sentiments. Wise is right that there have always been reactionary movements by members of the privileged majority, who want to get back to an era when they were in charge and when minorities were kept “in their place”; and the resurgence of the racist and xenophobic Right in America, of which Glenn Beck and Jan Brewer are undoubtedly examples, is an instance of this. (It’s a very old strain of political thought, dating back, in the case of America, to the Know-Nothing Party and other nativist movements in the nineteenth century, as well as to the old Southern Dixiecrat mentality that propped up institutionalized racial segregation and white supremacy for many decades after the end of the Civil War.) And I hope Wise is also right that such movements will not, in the end, prevail.

Yes, of course it’s true that privilege isn’t monolithic. Sociologists and activists have been taking account of this observation for a long time. This is what the concepts of intersectionality andkyriarchy are about. We live in a society which privileges various characteristics over others; but the same person may have some privileged characteristics and some non-privileged characteristics, and be a victim of some forms of discrimination but not others. A black heterosexual working-class man faces some forms of discrimination and not others; so too does a white middle-class lesbian woman. Similarly, it’s also true to say that there are multiple interlocking forms of prejudice and social hierarchy, operating at different levels of the social order. For instance, a Muslim LGBT person in Britain might be discriminated against in multiple contexts; xe may be a victim of homophobic prejudice within hir own community, and, simultaneously, a victim of anti-Muslim prejudice in society at large. 
So this is not an argument against the concept of privilege. It’s something that people concerned with issues of inequality and social justice have been writing and talking about for a long time.

I’m not arguing against the concept of privilege as such, I just think the concept’s advocates present it in a simplistic and skewed way.  For all their talk of intersecting zones and kyriarchy, they seem unable or unwilling to think outside the conceptual framework of hegemonic majorities oppressing different minorities in different ways.  It never occurs to them that in certain circumstances minorities can have power over a majority; that this will increasingly be the case in an ever more multicultural society; and that the wider majority’s putative hegemony is thus moot.

The most interesting part of the incident described in that newspaper article is not the fact that the black Muslim attackers used a racial 
epithet against their victim.  It’s that the judge didn’t see fit to regard this as a ‘racially aggravated’ assault.

There is, in Western society, a major difference between the use of racial epithets against whites and against ethnic minorities: the latter reinforces an existing pattern of oppression, the other does not.

But if the British criminal justice system treats black or Muslim racists less stringently than white racists, doesn’t that imply that these alleged structures of privileged oppression are hardly as hegemonic and all-pervasive as you suggest?  Why has everyone heard of  Stephen Lawrence while the names Kriss Donald and Ross Parker mean nothing to most people?

In any case, even if this “existing pattern of oppression” does exist, where are you taking this? You can make a case that white racism’s privileged position makes it a greater evil than anti-white racism considered as a whole; but it you’re surely not suggesting that individual acts of anti-white racism are intrinsically less evil than individual acts of white racism and therefore should be treated more leniently?  If a white woman has just been beaten to a pulp by a black Muslim gang, it’s cold comfort to inform her that, well, never mind dear, at least your attackers weren’t reinforcing an existing pattern of oppression!

(It’s worth adding that, as far as I can see, the CPS’ own guidelines on ‘racially aggravated’ offences make no mention of whether a particular racist act props up a pre-existing hegemony or not; they merely proceed from the assumption that offences with a racial component are intrinsically worse than those without:  The impact on victims is different for each individual, but there are common problems that are experienced by victims of racist of religiously aggravated crime. They can feel extremely isolated or fearful of going out or even staying at home. They may become withdrawn, and suspicious of organisations or strangers. Their mental and physical health may suffer in a variety of ways. For young people in particular, the impact can be damaging to their self-esteem or identity etc. Personally I find this highly tendentious (don’t victims of non-racist crime also experience fear and dismay?), but if you’re going to work on those assumptions, you should apply them even-handedly.)

But it is certainly not true that a “clerisy” of “white liberals” dominate the discourse to the exclusion of right-wing and conservative voices. Far from it. Such a claim entirely ignores the influence of some of the most powerful opinion-formers on both sides of the Atlantic – wealthy and influential conservatives like Rupert Murdoch, Lord Rothermere, the Koch brothers, and so forth. 

As far as I can tell, Murdoch is a cynical opportunist who will back whichever political horse looks like winning  and the Kochs are neocons – hardly exemplars of traditional conservatism.    The libertarian ideals of the political ‘Right’ work hand in hand with the liberal ideology of the political Left  to undermine traditional communitarian societies: both (for very different reasons) dismiss questions of culture, beliefs, origins and identity as irrelevant at best, pernicious at worst.  Ask yourself why, if the reactionary Right is so powerful, mass immigration of ethnic minorities into Europe occurred in the first place as a top-down imposition on the native European peoples without their consent and has continued to occur whatever colour tie the Prime Minister of the day wears. Naturally I’m not suggesting any sort of conspiracy has been at work, merely that the course of events in recent history is hardly what one would expect if the Right ran the show.

The influence of the likes of the Guardian or Rachel Maddow, say, over public opinion tends to be rather less than that of the likes of the Daily Mail, the Sun, the Daily Express, Fox News, and so forth. Meanwhile, the mainstream Left mostly stays remarkably quiet about the issue [of immigration], because the xenophobes have succeeded in dominating the discourse. Whenever there is a major news story about immigration, even the “liberal” BBC will wheel out the vile Sir Andrew Green of “MigrationWatch”, the smiling and respectable face of xenophobia, to spew scare-stories about demographic time bombs, without anyone to rebut his claims.

I disagree.  The Guardian may have a pygmy circulation but its constituency is entrenched in the BBC, the universities, the teaching professions and  the ‘social services’ (not to mention the Anglican hierarchy!), which together wield a not-insignificant influence.   The BBC might occasionally allow a lone conservative voice to be broadcast in discussion programmes, but that’s nothing compared to its notoriously biassed  news coverage and drama productions.  But don’t take my word for it – BBC pundit Andrew Marr frankly admitted as much: “The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It’s a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.”

(And “ethnomasochistic” is among the most meaningless words I’ve ever heard.)

Really? Expressions like ‘Uncle Tom’ or ‘self-hating Jew’ have been much used and abused but they have a basis in reality nonetheless. What about those 19th- and 20th-century Welsh anglophiles who zealously tried to suppress their own language?

An  ethnomasochist  is a person who has been conditioned to be ashamed of his own ethnic identity.  (It’s somewhat analagous to the concept of ‘false consciousness’ which Marxists and feminists use to designate those who fail to display the attitudes allegedly proper to their particular social situation.)  IMO cartoonish accounts that portray white/European/Western/Christian history as an unrelieved catalogue of oppression and exploitation inculcate just such an attitude of self-loathing, as does shrill propaganda which informs us that any display of ethnic pride (or even self-identification) by whites is racist or xenophobic.

(My use of the term ‘ethnomasochist’ was not intended as a jibe against you BTW. You’re not in the least bit ashamed of your ethnicity because you genuinely seem to have no consciousness of such an identity. Remember this exchange?

 I would say such a scenario would mean Britain as a distinct ethno-cultural entity would have ceased to exist. 

Probably. But why should I care? :-/

I don’t feel any attachment to Britain as an “ethno-cultural identity”. I don’t subscribe to nationalism of any sort, and I don’t identify with any sort of collective shared identity.

My being “British” is simply a legal fact – one which confers on me a certain amount of (unearned) privilege, insofar as it gives me the freedom to live and work in a country which is both wealthy and relatively liberal. But I want to extend those privileges to everyone who wants them (insofar as I’m in favour of complete open-borders immigration), and I would much rather live in a world in which nation-states and national identities cease to exist as anything other than historical curiosities.

I wouldn’t presume to blame or admonish you for this – if that’s how you feel, that’s how you feel.  I just think it’s unjust to brand those for whom ethnicity does form part of their self-identity as bigots.

And yet … I can’t help wondering if you’re quite as deracinated as you claim. You occasionally express affection for elements of traditional English culture – a poem, an old Anglican hymn, the British monarchy, the architecture of Oxford.  Surely you can appreciate that these things didn’t pop into existence ex nihilo?  They emerged in a particular cultural matrix rooted in a particular ethnic matrix.  If that ethno-cultural complex disappears, nothing like them will ever be produced again.    A form of life would have died.  If that prospect really leaves you unmoved, I can’t argue with that, but I don’t see why those who love those beautiful things, who identify with them and who resolve to defend them are for that reason evil.)

Present-day immigration, along similar lines, is demonized by the xenophobic Right in both Britain and America as something to be feared, and something that must be warded off by walls, border fences and more institutionalized violence against immigrants 

Recently over on Pharyngula you wrote: In this case the disagreement is not so much about the facts of the situation; I certainly do not dispute that large-scale immigration tends to produce cultural change. Rather, I just don’t understand why this should be seen as a bad thing. I can’t see why we would want to segregate the planet artificially into culturally-homogeneous regions, or why an influx of people from another cultural background should be something to be feared. Having grown up in a diverse, multicultural community myself, I honestly regard such fears as simply irrational xenophobia.

John H Schaar put the case for the defence much better than I could:

“At its core, patriotism means love of one’s homeplace, and of the familiar things and scenes associated with the homeplace. In this sense, patriotism is one of the basic human sentiments. If not a natural tendency in the species, it is at least a proclivity produced by realities basic to human life, for territoriality, along with family, has always been a primary associative bond. We become devoted to the people, places and ways that nurture us, and what is familiar and nurturing seems also natural and right. This is the root of patriotism. …. Even if we leave the homeplace for a larger world, finding delight in its variety and novelty, we delight as much in returning to familiar things. The theme-of-homecoming is the central motif of patriotic discourse, as old and as deep as the return of Odysseus from Troy, and the feeling is always the same …The other side of the case is the melancholy figure of the lone wanderer, or of the Stoic whose “my home is everywhere” meant he had a home nowhere.To be a patriot is to have a patrimony; or, perhaps more accurately, the patriot is one who is grateful for a legacy and recognizes that the legacy makes him a debtor. There is a whole way of being in the world, captured best by the word reverence, which defines life by its debts;: one is what one owes, what one acknowledges as a rightful debt: or obligation. The patriot moves within that mentality. The gift of land, people, language, gods memories, and customs, which is the patrimony of the patriot, defines what he or she is. Patrimony is mixed with person; the two are barely separable. The very tone and rhythm of a life, the shapes of perception, the texture of its homes and fears come from membership in a territorially rooted group.The conscious patriot is one who feels deeply indebted for these gifts, grateful to the people and places through which they come, and determined to defend the legacy against enemies and pass it unspoiled to those who will come after.”  

The great Welsh nationalist Saunders Lewis put it more succinctly: “Civilization is more than an abstraction. It must have a local habitation and name.

 If at first you don’t secede … 

If you want someone less confrontational than Tim Wise to
explain white privilege and the ways in which racism and racial bias continue to
shape our perceptions unconsciously, see
this sermon by the Reverend Fred Small, which I found  very perceptive when I heard it in person.

====

But if the British criminal justice system treats black or
Muslim racists less stringently than white racists, doesn’t that imply that
these alleged structures of privileged oppression are hardly as hegemonic and
all-pervasive as you suggest?

In almost all circumstances the criminal justice system, on both sides of the
Atlantic, is measurably harsher to ethnic minorities than to whites who commit
the same offences. This bias creeps in at all levels: police stops and
searches, arrests, investigation, prosecution, sentencing. This is a well-documented
phenomenon in the United States, but it is true in Britain too.

And this is only beginning to scratch the surface of racial injustice: the
pervasiveness of stereotypes, continued discrimination in employment and
education, continued socio-economic inequality, etc. Your finding a single anecdote of an occasion on which ethnic-minority defendants were sentenced less harshly
than their white counterparts might have been does not even begin to rebalance the scales of systemic oppression.

In any case, even if this “existing pattern of
oppression” does exist, where are you taking this? You can make a case
that white racism’s privileged position makes it a greater evil than
anti-white racism considered as a whole; but it you’re surely not
suggesting that individual acts of anti-white racism are intrinsically
less evil than individual acts of white racism and therefore should be
treated more leniently?  If a white woman has just been beaten to a pulp
by a black Muslim gang, it’s cold comfort to inform her that, well, never mind
dear, at least your attackers weren’t reinforcing an existing pattern of
oppression!

Of course acts of violence are wrong and to be deplored, by whomever they are committed, and racially-motivated violence especially so. I certainly was not suggesting otherwise. But your complaint, as I understood it, was about the sentence imposed in a particular case, and criminal sentencing has never been
tailored solely to the perceived moral culpability of an individual offender:
there has always been an element of “sending a message” (as Voltaire
put it, il est bon de temps en temps de tuer un amiral pour encourager
les autres) to address broader issues in society.

I am, in any case, the wrong person to confront about that particular issue,
because, as you know well, I am not an advocate of the approach of trying to
force social change through the deterrent effect of harsher punishment, whether such proposals are advanced to serve conservative ends or progressive ones. I favour an approach to justice which is restorative rather than retributive, and which is based on rehabilitation, education, healing and forgiveness.

I wouldn’t presume to blame or admonish you for this – if
that’s how you feel, that’s how you feel.  I just think it’s unjust to
brand those for whom ethnicity does form part of their self-identity as
bigots.

And yet … I can’t help wondering if you’re quite as deracinated as you claim.
You occasionally express affection for elements of traditional English culture
– a poem, an old Anglican hymn, the British monarchy, the architecture of
Oxford.  Surely you can appreciate that these things didn’t pop into
existence ex nihilo?  They emerged in a particular cultural matrix
rooted in a particular ethnic matrix.  If that ethno-cultural complex
disappears, nothing like them will ever be produced again.    A form
of life would have died.  If that prospect really leaves you unmoved, I
can’t argue with that, but I don’t see why those who love those beautiful
things, who identify with them and who resolve to defend them are for
that reason evil.)

I do not blame people for appreciating the manifestations of the culture in
which they grew up. (As you observe, I have plenty of affection for much of
England’s culture and history.) I do criticize them for
believing that a culture needs to be “defended”, preserved artificially in an eternal simulacrum of some arbitrary point in its history, forcibly excluding outsiders by means of walls and fences and armed guards. Loving and caring for our history does not mean fearing any and all change, it does not mean that we ought to cower in terror as though we were besieged, and
it certainly does not justify denying a safe harbour to the world’s poor and
oppressed, or discriminating on the basis of race, ethnicity or skin colour.
All human beings, regardless of race, ethnicity or nationality, are of equal
value and importance, and worthy of equal rights and equal respect; and no
human life should ever be sacrificed on the altar of “defending our
culture”.

Culture is not a constant, and cultural change is not synonymous with
destruction. The culture of England (not monolithic to begin with, of course,
but I’m speaking in broad terms) changed greatly between 1800 and 1900, greatly again between 1900 and 1950, and perhaps still more greatly between 1950 and the present day. What it means to be “English” or
“British”, however one wishes to delineate those terms, has never
been fixed or unchanging. Nor should we wish it to be.

The traditions and institutions and cultural forms to which you refer – the
monarchy,  the corpus of English literature, the landscape and the
architecture, and so on – have not disappeared, nor have people ceased to care for them; but they have not remained constant, either. Rather, they have adapted to successive waves of change, and that change has enriched them. Diversity is an opportunity, not a threat. My enjoyment of the poetry of
Shakespeare, J.R.R. Tolkien or John Betjeman is in no wise diminished by the fact that I also enjoy that of Benjamin Zephaniah, and the latter is for me as much a part of England and English culture as the former are. I can appreciate both the architecture of Christ Church and that of a Buddhist peace pagoda, and I feel joyful that both can co-exist in the same diverse country. I can enjoy a Bach chorale, a traditional Anglican hymn and an African-American spiritual; seeing the beauty in one does not diminish the beauty in the others. Our society,
our art, our music, our language, our literature and poetry, even our cuisine
have been enormously enriched by the cultural and ethnic diversity of modern England. Welcoming the future does not mean throwing away the past. It simply means opening our minds, our borders and our hearts to change, welcoming diversity, treating everyone as equals, with unconditional love and compassion.

“I’m A Good Old Rebel” is, as far as I’m aware, a racist song; I’ve only come across it promoted by Confederate-flag-waving Southern racists. (Indeed, it’s hard to see how any song that glorifies the Confederacy and its cause could be other than racist.) I don’t understand why you’re posting it here.

Response part deux.

As far as I can tell, Murdoch is a cynical opportunist who will back
whichever political horse looks like winning  and the Kochs are neocons –
 hardly exemplars of traditional conservatism.    The libertarian ideals
 of the political ‘Right’ work hand in hand with the liberal ideology of
 the political Left  to undermine traditional communitarian societies:
both (for very different reasons) dismiss questions of culture, beliefs,
 origins and identity as irrelevant at best, pernicious at worst.

Well, of course it’s true that there are different kinds of right-wing thought. But I think there’s a  gap, in this regard, between the views of the conservative elite and those of the conservative grassroots.

In my experience, the dominant elite of the modern British Tories – ministers, policy advisers, think-tank policy wonks, and so on – tend mostly to be very much in the libertarian or classical liberal tradition, for the most part. The paradigmatic features of today’s young, educated, metropolitan British Tory are an impassioned commitment to free-market economics, coupled with the rhetoric (if not always the reality) of personal liberty and limited government; she or he is likely to have a well-thumbed copy of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom or Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom on the shelf next to a complete set of Margaret Thatcher’s memoirs. In Victorian terms, they’re really closer to Whigs than Tories. Most are also broadly libertarian on social as well as economic issues, perfectly comfortable with same-sex marriage and abortion, and so forth.

Having moved from the libertarian Right to the liberal Left, and moved in both circles, I’d say there is some common ground: both grew out of the philosophical tradition of Enlightenment liberal thought (and both would be happy to regard, say, John Stuart Mill as an intellectual inspiration). Despite profound differences, liberals and libertarians would agree on some basic precepts: the value of individual autonomy, the importance of creating a society in which individuals are free to pursue their own conception of the good life, within the constraints of respecting others’ freedom to do the same. From this flow our most cherished shared ideals – freedom of expression, freedom of religion, the right to political participation, constitutional governance, the rule of law – even if liberals and libertarians constantly disagree profoundly with one another, and amongst themselves, about what these principles mean and how they should be applied in practice.

You, of course, couldn’t really be called a “conservative” in this modern sense. Your brand of conservatism is perhaps a throwback to an older tradition, the conservatism of Cavaliers, Jacobites and High Tories; a nostalgia for the days of throne and altar, King and Bishop, village squire and village priest. As far as I understand it, such traditional conservatives reject the liberal paradigm altogether, in favour of an older tradition based on cultural continuity, the shared identity of the local community and the nation, and traditional religion and social mores; the idea that the role of the state is not primarily to promote individuals’ autonomy, but to affirm and defend traditional culture and traditional values as a positive good. As I’ve said before, the conservative thinker of whom you most remind me is Roger Scruton, though you’ve talked before about your areas of disagreement with him (notably, his defence of traditional religion on purely instrumental grounds). I should add that I’ve read very little of Scruton’s work and am no expert on him – he wasn’t my cup of tea even when I was a conservative – and I hope I’m not strawmanning him inadvertently.

However, I also think that while these distinctions are relevant when we’re talking about the discourse of intellectuals, they are of less relevance when we’re talking about public opinion. The average Mail-reading Middle England conservative voter is not motivated by an informed philosophical commitment to Hayekian classical liberalism and market economics, nor by a conscious Scrutonian commitment to community and cultural continuity. Rather, the key motivating force seems to be a crude tribal nationalism and nativism, coupled with a dose of hostility aimed at those identified as the Other – be it immigrants, “benefit scroungers”, European judges, or anyone else who is a convenient target of condemnation. Grassroots conservatism is driven not by any coherent political or economic philosophy, but by tribal identity, and an anger against those who are seen as threatening that identity. They’re not interested in the kinds of fine-grained distinctions that you’re drawing. This, above all, is an important reason why we have such illiberal protectionist immigration policies, and why the conservative elite are extremely reluctant to apply the logic of free markets and free trade, which they espouse on most other questions, to the question of the movement of people across borders. They know it will lose them votes.

(When you speak of “mass immigration”, you fail to acknowledge the extent to which Western governments in the last twenty years have, in fact, made conscious and concerted efforts to stem the flow of migrants, and to make life difficult for those who do arrive. Of course, the back-and-forth of policies on immigration reflects the tension between populist xenophobic sentiments and the economic interest of business in supplying itself with migrant labour. But I digress.)

Interestingly, in the US, the conservative Republican elite now seems to be hoist by its own petard. They have, of course, long fanned the flames of the “culture wars”, whipping up grassroots ill-educated White-Conservative-Christian-Real-American tribalistic anger against immigrants, sexual and religious minorities, and the “liberal intellectual elite”. Now the people who truly believe these talking-points have actually taken over the party: no longer is it the libertarian fiscal conservatives who pull the strings. Santorum’s brand of Christian conservatism is a vivid example. He explicitly rejects libertarianism, having said “…[libertarians] have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do
whatever they want to do. Government should keep our taxes down and keep
 our regulation low and that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom,
we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues, you know, people should do
 whatever they want. Well, that is not how traditional conservatives
view the world, and I think most conservatives understand that
individuals can’t go it alone…”

contd from below

Hi David, apologies for taking so long to reply to your responses. I do appreciate your forbearance in tolerating and engaging at length with opinions you must find frustratingly misguided at best.  For my part, I enjoy our little chats; although we rarely agree, I respect your intelligence and find your impassioned idealism heartening in a cynical age.

Down to business.

If you want someone less confrontational than Tim Wise to explain white privilege and the ways in which racism and racial bias continue to
shape our perceptions unconsciously, see this sermon by the Reverend Fred Small, which I found  very perceptive when I heard it in person.

I must confess whenever I read Uncle Tim I start to think maybe Anders Breivik had a point, which is surely an occasion of sin at any time, let alone during Lent.  So let’s see what the Reverend Small has to say …

1.)  “We know that the obvious physical differences among populations of different  continents and climates are not distinct but gradual.          If you were to walk north from Cape Town, South Africa, through Namibia, Angola, Congo, Cameroon, Nigeria, Niger, Algeria, Morocco, take the ferry across the Strait of Gibraltar and press on through Spain, France, Germany, Denmark, all the way to Stockholm, Sweden, the pigmentation of the indigenous population at your destination would be very different than at your starting point.  But at no point along your journey would you or could you ever have said, “Aha!  I have crossed the boundary between the black race and the white race”—because there is no boundary and there is no race.        Eighty-five percent of all human variation can be found in any local population, whether Egyptian, Norwegian, Peruvian, or Mongolian.  Any two Koreans are likely to be as genetically different as a Korean and a Spaniard.”Here Rev Small exhibits a perennial liberal characteristic – the tendency to see everything in abstract terms, divorced from the particularities of actual persons’ lived experience.  People don’t typically lead a nomadic existence trekking from Cape Town to Sweden, nor are they normally capable of peering into individuals’ genetic structures.  So while Rev Small’s assertions are doubtless true, they are completely irrelevant to how any ethnic group actually perceives itself and others, which is precisely as ethnic groups.  How high this perception ought to rank in any hierarchy of values is a legitimate topic for debate, and I for one would certainly say it does not justify aggressive chauvinism.  But it is futile to argue that it has no basis because it disappears from a global perspective or at the level of DNA.2.)  “Wu asks us to imagine a white couple who “invites all their family and friends to the wedding, and it turns out that everyone on the guest list is white, except possibly a few Asian Americans from college and maybe a lone African American couple.  Their wedding may not be color conscious in the sense that they sat down and jotted down a list that included whites and excluded blacks, but it is color conscious in the sense that the acquaintances they made during childhood and under their parents’ upbringing, throughout school and on into the workplace and their adult social life, are all white, or almost all white and Asian American.  Without their having made a single intentional decision to practice racial segregation, but not by accident either, the story of their lives bears out the breadth and depth of the racial abyss.”Perhaps my privilege is showing but I honestly don’t see what’s supposed to be so sinister about this.  Are Wu & Small saying that the happy couple are racist for not having more black friends?  Or that they’ve unthinkingly (perhaps guiltlessly) conformed to racist societal structures by not seeking out more black friends?  Or that society is structurally racist for not providing them with the opportunity to make more black friends?  It’s all bollocks.  I would bet good money that the guests at an African-American wedding would be mostly African-American; mostly Asian-American at an Asian-American wedding; mostly Jewish-American at a Jewish-American wedding; mostly Hispanic-American at a Hispanic-American wedding; mostly Italian-American at an Italian-American wedding; and so on and on.  Why should that be considered a problem?  Of course people will form friendships among those of their fellows who seem most familiar, most alike.  That’s why you have “communities”.  Don’t Anglo-Saxon Americans deserve a “community” too?  Apparently not.  The day Wu & Small presume to lecture an ethnic minority bride and groom about the  deplorable dearth of white Anglo-Saxon faces among their guests is the day Hell freezes over and Satan skates to work.Sure, you can point out that Anglo-Saxon Americans still form a natural overall majority in the United States and that their “community” is consequently more potent in socio-economic-politico-cultural terms and that this gives them a certain unearned advantage, or privilege (“Every month is white history month” etc).  Well, in the first place, as I argued below, members of an overall majority can be minorities at a local level.  The sole white boy sitting amid a sea of black faces in his classroom at an inner-city school is not in any sort of privileged position.  But even if we accept that the white majority have a degree of unearned privilege, so what?  Maybe it’s a moral blind spot of mine, but I have never been able to understand why “unearned” should be considered synonymous with “unjust”, even if it might sometimes seem unfair to some.You may be aware that Don Ness, the mayor of Duluth, Minnesota, recently had  billboards erected as part of a campaign designed to enlighten the white residents of Duluth about their privilege.  “Duluth”, the campaign website grimly informs us, “has had an overwhelmingly dominant white culture for a very long time. This fact has contributed to the development of a monoculture in which white norms are dominant and considered ‘normal’.”  Yes?  And?  So?  In a town in sub-Saharan Africa, black Africans have the privilege that comes with settled majority status.  Would Mayor Ness consider lecturing those townsfolk that their privileged position in black society is an intolerable affront to whites?  We both know what would happen if he tried to pull a stunt like that – his lily-white backside would be kicked out of town and back to Duluth, Minnesota, in short order.  And quite right too.There’s no escaping the logic.   If  white privilege is a bad thing and if white privilege is the inevitable result of “an overwhelmingly dominant white culture”, it follows that an overwhelmingly dominant white culture is a bad thing.  But if privilege per se (and not just white privilege) is bad, it follows that overwhelmingly dominant black, Asian, etc  cultures are bad too.  Do you think  any ethnically homogenous society – “a monoculture in which [black/Asian/etc] norms are dominant and considered ‘normal’” – is something intrinsically undesirable?  Or is it a case of “Africa for the Africans, Asia for the Asians, Europe and North America for everyone”?3.)  “A few years ago, Kyle, Lex, Julie, and I were playing the game called Scruples, in which players predict how another will respond to an ethical dilemma.  Kyle drew a card that asked: if he saw a parked car unlocked with its headlights left on, would he turn them off?        Now Kyle is the one of the kindest and most principled people you’ll ever meet.  All of us, including his wife, were sure he’d turn the lights off.          Kyle said, “No way.”          As a young black man, he explained, entering a vehicle not his own, even for a moment, risked deadly consequences.  What if the owner arrived just as he was opening the door?  Or a police officer?          If I were to open a car door to turn off the headlights and found myself suddenly challenged, my pale skin and my confident sense of entitlement would protect me as I calmly explained I was just doing a good deed.          Kyle’s darker skin would brand him a suspect.  Fear would flicker in his eyes.  And his fear would be justified.        Julie, Lex, and I were colorblind.  Kyle was colorwise.”& “If I’m walking on a deserted city street at night and I see three African-American young men approaching, my body tenses more than if they were European-American.          I wish that were not true.  But it is. 
       I do not invite that response.  It arises without thinking.   
       I used to feel ashamed—until Jesse Jackson, Jr. confessed that he experiences the same response even though he too is African-American.  His response and mine are both the consequence of conditioning we neither asked for nor can control.   
       My task is not to be colorblind, because I can’t be.   
       My task is to be colorwise: to use my intelligence consciously and courageously to acknowledge, to engage, and to overcome my prejudices.”

Sadly, such perceptions are likely to last as long as blacks commit a disproportionate number of violent crimes, as I believe is the case in the USA and UK.  As long as that unfortunate state of affairs persists, it is perhaps not unreasonable to err on the side of caution and put personal safety above political correctness.  Consider these two separate, true stories, fascinating examples of what happens when liberal programming is strong enough to overrule instinct and common sense:

A.)  The woman had just left the Babies R Us store on when she noticed a man in a tattered military coat lurking in the parking lot, she told police. The woman told detectives she was worried because the man looked like a thug, but she didn’t want to seem racist.She had just purchased a princess hat for her daughter’s first birthday pictures when the man stepped up behind her and pulled a gun from under his coat.
“The suspect stated, ‘All I want is money. You will be fine. You don’t want anything to happen to your baby. Just listen to me,”’ the investigating detective wrote in his reports.
“She said she walked around her vehicle and opened the driver’s side door. She pushed the seat forward and the suspect got into the vehicle and sat behind the driver’s seat. The victim asked the suspect where they were going and he stated, ‘The closest bank that’s yours. If I see the cops, your baby’s dead.’”
The woman told detectives she was worried because the man looked like a thug, but she didn’t want to seem racist. “She said he had an odor of alcohol on his breath, and the subject stated, ‘Don’t freak out,’” the police report indicates.
The woman offered to give the man several hundred dollars she had in her car, and drove him to the bank to withdraw another $500. The man then demanded she drive to Fruitvale Junior High, where he raped the woman at gunpoint in front of her daughter.

B.) In her remarkable story, “Beyond Rape: A Survivor’s Journey” Joanna Connors, a reporter at The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, writes about her experiences getting raped.  But the story isn’t just about rape.  It also addresses important issues of race and class.The essential tension resides in a simple and explosive event, now 20 years old: A black man raped a white woman. The history of that potent narrative is packed with truth and lies, racist injustice and racial suspicion, cliché and mythology.This story lurches powerfully into race in the first of five chapters, as Connors speculates that she might have run away in the awkward moments before David Francis attacked her had it not been for the fear that she’d appear racist. A few paragraphs later, readers learn that the rapist taunted Connors, asking if she’d fantasized about sex with a black man. That’s a pretty raw entrée into race in what was already a bold step into another taboo. …[Connors] spoke one simple truth that I think I’d wanted to hear more about: That it was her desire to not appear to be a bigot that might most be responsible for the decision to go into that theater [where Francis raped her]. That’s a much scarier racial truth, to me, than the more mundane, ‘I found myself afraid of all black men’ truth that she was hesitant to speak. Because if white women — or white people in general — were to act on the first notion, that you question your racial motivations at your great peril, then in a way we’ll encourage more acts of exclusion and outright prejudice.
I wonder whether the Reverend Small would class these two female victims as colourblind or colourwise …?  Conservative blogger Lawrence Auster coined his own term for such folk that seems harsh but is tragically apt – Eloi.Of course, as TS Eliot said,  “humankind cannot bear very much reality”.  (Check out this news report  on last year’s London riots.  The black comedy starts at  3 minutes, 25 seconds.  As Groucho Marx said, “who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”)

In almost all circumstances the criminal justice system, on both sides of the Atlantic, is measurably harsher to ethnic minorities than to whites who commit the same offences. This bias creeps in at all levels: police stops and searches, arrests, investigation, prosecution, sentencing. This is awell-documented phenomenon in the United States, but it is true in Britain too. 

Well I don’t see how you can confidently assert that this is caused by “institutional racism”. It may just be that disproportionate arrests and convictions of ethnic minorities are because certain offences are disproportionately committed by ethnic minorities.  How do you know they aren’t?  What other indicator than arrests and convictions is  there?  The first article you linked to claims that “African-American adults have been arrested at a rate of 2.8 to 5.5 times higher than white adults in every year from 1980 to 2007, yet African Americans and whites have similar rates of illicit drug use and dealing”.  No evidence is provided for these “similar rates”.  The Guardian article you linked to also claims “ there is no evidence that black people use or deal drugs more than white people.  And on what does it base this claim?  A dopey sociologist who points to a British Crime Survey study “that suggested black people are no more likely than white people to report using illicit drugs”.  Sorry, but that’s frankly risible.  Just because offences aren’t reported by members of a particular community doesn’t mean they’re not occurring within the community – particularly when it’s a matter of the offenders doing the reporting!  (And I note the sociologist has a transparent agenda – witness his surreal comment that “Criminalisation of illicit drugs reinforces social and ethnic inequalities. Decriminalisation of drug use would help to reduce these inequalities”.)  As for disparities between sentencing for black and white criminals who have committed similar offences, again you can’t just assume it’s all down to racism,  One would need to know all sorts of variables before one drew that conclusion, for example whether the criminals in question were first-time or repeat offenders, whether the offence was committed in conjunction with other more serious offences, whether or not they showed remorse etc.

And this is only beginning to scratch the surface of racial injustice: the pervasiveness of stereotypes

Yes, there are plenty of negative racial stereotypes out there – for example that blacks are aggressive, stupid, lazy and cowardly (“feets don’t fail me now!”).  Of course there are also positive stereotypes – for example that blacks are athletic, virile and soulful.  Most ethnic stereotypes are similarly balanced – Scots are mean and dour but also shrewd and hardy, Chinese are cruel and devious but also ingenious and industrious, and so on.  Even the most hated people on earth, the Jews, are generally acknowledged as having formidable intellectual abilities, not least by their enemies.  I think this sort of thing is just one way people come to terms with difference, drawing the sting of fear through semi-humorous disparagement.  Most adults and probably most children don’t take stereotypes too seriously or personally, even when they recognise that they might contain a grain of truth.  Not to deny that they can have toxic effects in some situations, but as long as human differences exist they’re not going to go away.(Another thing to bear in mind is that whether a stereotype is judged to be negative or positive will depend in large part on one’s own perspective.  Ever read the Ian Fleming novel Live and Let Die?  I would say this is a genuinely racist book.  There are passages which describe the visceral feelings of physical revulsion James Bond feels in the company of black people, with absolutely no hint that the reader is expected to disapprove of this attitude – on the contrary, the passages are written with a kind of lascivious glee which is quite disturbing and would make any decent ready queasy.  For that and other reasons I wouldn’t want my children to read this book.  However, apart from the crude racism,  one thing the book does is reinforce a particular stereotype of black people – that they are superstitious.  The black criminal mastermind in the story assumes the persona of the voodoo deity Baron Samedi in order to cow his followers into obedience.  Lots of descriptions of black minions shivering and rolling their eyes when confronted by voodoo paraphernalia.  When I first read the book in my early teens I grasped that what was being portrayed here was an established stereotype, one I’d seen in other contexts.  As a nice middle-class liberal atheist boy I considered this superstitious stereotype to be a negative one and rejected it out of hand as racist…  Several decades later, the media company I work for has just released the first issue of an ambitious new product, a glossy magazine aimed at a readership of young black urban professionals.  Out of curiosity, I skim through a copy in the newsroom and it’s pretty much what you’d expect, lots of pictures of  young black men and women who have succeeded in business, IT etc, impeccably dressed in pinstripe suits or labcoats, standing next to big shiny cars outside big shiny office buildings or peering at hi-tech pieces of equipment on factory floors.  The whole thing was clearly designed to promote positive role models and career paths for black youngsters.  What I found interesting, however, were the classified ads at the back of the magazine.  Page after page after page crammed with adverts from professional  voodoo practitioners offering their services to lift various spells and curses, exorcise spirits, provide protection from the evil eye, etc.  I’m not making this up or exaggerating, there must have been hundreds of these little ads for witch doctors.  Now I suspect that if you had seen that magazine you would have felt a stab of dismay – after all, here was an ethnic minority conforming to a negative stereotype.  To me, it was quite different. While I found the contrast between the classified ads at the back and the ethos of main body of the magazine to be amusing, I didn’t see the former as negative.  In the intervening time from reading Ian Fleming to glancing at that magazine, I had gone from liberal atheist to reactionary Catholic.  Certainly I had no love for pagan idolatry (of which I regarded voodoo as a particularly depraved example) and rejected all distinctions between ‘white’ and ‘black’ magic as spurious – nevertheless I now felt those modern-day witch doctors advertising their services had a surer grasp of reality than any of the secular liberals I knew.  However distorted and error-filled their belief-system may have been, they knew reality had a spiritual as well as a material dimension, knew powers contended for the human soul.  At that moment in the newspaper office, looking at that magazine, they were suddenly less alien to me than the majority of my white colleagues.)

continued discrimination in employment and education, continued socio-economic inequality, etc.

But how do you know racial inequality in these cases is the result of racial injustice on the part of whites?(“Systemic oppression”?)

contd.

I do not blame people for appreciating the manifestations of the culture in which they grew up. (As you observe, I have plenty of affection for much of England’s culture and history.) I docriticize them for believing that a culture needs to be “defended”, preserved artificially in an eternal simulacrum of some arbitrary point in its history, forcibly excluding outsiders by means of walls and fences and armed guards. Loving and caring for our history does not mean fearing any and all change, it does not mean that we ought to cower in terror as though we were besieged, and it certainly does not justify denying a safe harbour to the world’s poor and oppressed, or discriminating on the basis of race, ethnicity or skin colour.  All human beings, regardless of race, ethnicity or nationality, are of equal value and importance, and worthy of equal rights and equal respect; and no human life should ever be sacrificed on the altar of “defending our culture”. 

Culture is not a constant, and cultural change is not synonymous with destruction. The culture of England (not monolithic to begin with, of course, but I’m speaking in broad terms) changed greatly between 1800 and 1900, greatly again between 1900 and 1950, and perhaps still more greatly between 1950 and the present day. What it means to be “English” or ”British”, however one wishes to delineate those terms, has never been fixed or unchanging. Nor should we wish it to be. 

The traditions and institutions and cultural forms to which you refer – the monarchy,  the corpus of English literature, the landscape and the architecture, and so on – have not disappeared, nor have people ceased to care for them; but they have not remained constant, either. Rather, they have adapted to successive waves of change, and that change has enriched them. Diversity is an opportunity, not a threat. My enjoyment of the poetry of Shakespeare, J.R.R. Tolkien or John Betjeman is in no wise diminished by the fact that I also enjoy that of Benjamin Zephaniah, and the latter is for me as much a part of England and English culture as the former are. I can appreciate both the architecture of Christ Church and that of a Buddhist peace pagoda, and I feel joyful that both can co-exist in the same diverse country. I can enjoy a Bach chorale, a traditional Anglican hymn and an African-American spiritual; seeing the beauty in one does not diminish the beauty in the others. Our society, our art, our music, our language, our literature and poetry, even our cuisine have been enormously enriched by the cultural and ethnic diversity of modern England. Welcoming the future does not mean throwing away the past. It simply means opening our minds, our borders and our hearts to change, welcoming diversity, treating everyone as equals, with unconditional love and compassion.

No-one is suggesting a society can or should be artificially frozen at a particular point in time.  That would be absurd.  But it seems to me equally misguided to make a fetish of “change”.  Social change is merely the sum of human actions and is neither necessarily inevitable nor necessarily good.  When radical traditionalists seek to “change society” according to their own particular conception of the good, you regard the prospect of such change as something undesirable to be resisted.  We think the same about revolutionary liberals’ efforts to implement their agenda.

But how can change in the direction of greater “diversity” (ie multiculturalism) possibly be regarded as something undesirable to be resisted?  Well for one thing, as it has actually been implemented in Britain, it has been jarringly abrupt rather than an organic process over centuries (“… perhaps still more greatly between 1950 and the present day …”).  Add to that the fact that it was imposed without consultation with or consent from the people, and how could it not cause widespread seething resentment?  Suppose the leader of an African state encouraged mass immigration of white Europeans, so that towns’ black populations found their neighborhoods – the whole tenor of life in their country – changed beyond recognition in just a few decades.   Suppose this was done without consultation or consent.  And suppose any protest was officially decreed “racist” and punished by law.  The popular response would be anger and bewilderment – exactly the same as this Welshman experienced in London.

Moreover your talk of “unconditional love and compassion” fails to take into account what happens if that love and compassion is not reciprocated by the incomers.  I ask you in all seriousness – how are we supposed to view the grooming of white girls by Asian gangs, or the grotesque spectacle of “British Muslim” fanatics calling for the destruction of Britain or hatching terrorist plots on British soil, as “enrichments”?  How conceivably?  It’s no answer to say “but most of them are law-abiding”.  These problems exist, they exist here and they did not exist here before mass immigration.  You say “no human life should ever be sacrificed on the altar of ‘defending our culture’”.  I say no human life should ever be sacrificed on the altar of utopian fantasies of universal brotherhood.  (And like it or not, people do often value their culture, their way of life, over individual human lives.  That’s why they’re prepared to fight to the death – to kill or be killed – in its defence.  Better dead than red and all that.)

Granted previous social upheavals imposed from above have also been traumatic (Reformation, Industrial Revolution).  But by its very nature the multicultural experiment shatters the cultural cohesion of the state in an unprecedented manner.  I once asked you what I had in common with a militant Muslim in Bradford.  You replied by asking why I felt I needed to have anything in common with him.  The answer is simple: in  the absence of any feeling of commonality, there is nothing to bind us together as a society.  There is no community, only “communities”.  Ethnicity is just another name for this feeling of commonality, the shared things that enable a people to perceive themselves as such, as a “we”.  Shared language, shared history, shared customs, shared land and, yes, shared appearance to some extent.  The liberal Rawlsian state might claim to provide a neutral administrative framework within which different groups can theoretically coexist peacefully, but mutual respect and understanding are hard to sustain as long as groups define themselves as “us” and others as “them”.  And they always will.  Babel cannot be undone by legislative fiat.  Why should the peace that has proved so elusive between peoples inhabiting different territories be any easier to achieve when several peoples are artificially made to inhabit the same territory?

In this light, the fact that you can appreciate both Christian and Buddhist architecture, with no detriment to either, is beside the point.  I can appreciate a Buddhist pagoda too, but I can’t identify with it.  I’m not blind to the splendours of Islamic civilisation, but that civilisation remains alien to me and would so remain even if every Muslim was as peace-loving as the majority doubtless are.  Now you don’t experience a Buddhist temple or a mosque as something alien because you are genuinely disinterested.  You look at an Oxford college or village church and you think “oh that’s beautiful”.  You then look at a Buddhist temple and you think “that’s beautiful too”.  The patriot can do that as well.  But for you that’s as far as it goes, whereas for the patriot there’s something else going on.  When he looks at a village church he doesn’t just think “that’s beautiful” – he thinks “that’s me, that’s part of what made me who I am”.  And in doing so he makes a connection with countless generations long dead and as yet unborn.  
A mother can appreciate the beauty of another’s children but she will always love her own more, even if they are not as beautiful or strong or clever.  

“I’m A Good Old Rebel” is, as far as I’m aware, a racist song; I’ve only come across it promoted by Confederate-flag-waving Southern racists. (Indeed, it’s hard to see how any song that glorifies the Confederacy and its cause could be other than racist.) I don’t understand why you’re posting it here.

It’s not about racism, it’s about the defiance of a subjugated people.  Perhaps this is more to your taste.

Part deux:

Well, of course it’s true that there are different kinds of right-wing thought. 

You ain’t kidding.

http://bonald.wordpress.com/2010/12/31/a-taxonomy-of-the-right/

You, of course, couldn’t really be called a “conservative” in this modern sense. Your brand of conservatism is perhaps a throwback to an older tradition, the conservatism of Cavaliers, Jacobites and High Tories; a nostalgia for the days of throne and altar, King and Bishop, village squire and village priest. As far as I understand it, such traditional conservatives reject the liberal paradigm altogether, in favour of an older tradition based on cultural continuity, the shared identity of the local community and the nation, and traditional religion and social mores; the idea that the role of the state is not primarily to promote individuals’ autonomy, but to affirm and defend traditional culture and traditional values as a positive good. 

Wouldn’t quarrel with that, although my reactionary outlook is based less on nostalgia for a romantically idealised past than on the reluctant conviction that ancient evil lurks beneath the surface of modernity.  : )

As I’ve said before, the conservative thinker of whom you most remind me is Roger Scruton, though you’ve talked before about your areas of disagreement with him (notably, his defence of traditional religion on purely instrumental grounds). I should add that I’ve read very little of Scruton’s work and am no expert on him – he wasn’t my cup of tea even when I was a conservative – and I hope I’m not strawmanning him inadvertently. 

Yes, reading Scruton crystallised a lot of previously inchoate ideas.  Funnily enough, the book which did most to lift the veil from my eyes was about architecture rather than politics – The Classical Vernacular. Highly recommended (and not too technical).

However, I also think that while these distinctions are relevant when we’re talking about the discourse of intellectuals, they are of less relevance when we’re talking about public opinion. The average Mail-reading Middle England conservative voter is not motivated by an informed philosophical commitment to Hayekian classical liberalism and market economics, nor by a conscious Scrutonian commitment to community and cultural continuity.  … Grassroots conservatism is driven not by any coherent political or economic philosophy, but by tribal identity, and an anger against those who are seen as threatening that identity.  

Indeed, but unlike neocons, libertarians etc, radical traditionalists understand and sympathise with that tribalism. Indeed their whole project is largely an attempt to articulate the tribal experience in philosophical terms …

Why should that be considered a problem?  Of course people will form
friendships among those of their fellows who seem most familiar, most
alike.  That’s why you have “communities”.

But why do communities have to be defined according to race and ethnicity? You keep asserting that they should, but you don’t explain why. I have friends from many different cultures and backgrounds (and always have had, having grown up in Milton Keynes, an ethnically-diverse part of England), and I see nothing odd about this. Indeed, I’d say living in a diverse and multicultural community has enriched my life considerably.

Getting to know people is the best way to break down prejudice against them. There are plenty of people who were raised with racist beliefs, but have learned better from living in communities alongside people from other ethnic groups and getting to know them as friends and as neighbours. There are plenty of people who were once homophobic, but have changed their minds after a friend or family member came out as gay, or after getting to know gay people as family, friends and neighbours. There are plenty of people who harbour bigoted anti-immigrant political views, but who make mental exceptions for the immigrants they actually know personally as friends and neighbours. And so on.

This doesn’t mean that it isn’t also important to support movements that empower oppressed groups, and such movements have often turned on a sense of collective identity and pride in one’s identity (hence we talk about “gay pride”, and so on). But this is important and necessary precisely because those groups have historically been oppressed: it’s a means of redressing oppression. And it certainly does not mean that people’s most “natural” friendships are with people of their own race or ethnicity; that’s a preposterous claim.

Sure, you can point out that Anglo-Saxon Americans still form a natural
overall majority in the United States and that their “community” is
consequently more potent in socio-economic-politico-cultural terms and
that this gives them a certain unearned advantage, or privilege (“Every
month is white history month” etc).  Well, in the first place, as I
argued below, members of an overall majority can be minorities at a
local level.  The sole white boy sitting amid a sea of black faces in
his classroom at an inner-city school is not in any sort of privileged
position.

Yes, he is. He still exists in the context of a wider society which privileges white people – in the media, in the workplace and in business, in government and in public life. Schools, towns and neighbourhoods aren’t self-contained bubbles; they are part of a wider culture, and in that wider culture, white people are the privileged class.

It’s also worth noting, as a tangential point, that being the dominant group in a society, in a sociological sense, is not about numbers alone. It’s about power, cultural hegemony, status, perceptions. (Look at white minority rule under colonialism in much of Africa, or in late-twentieth-century South Africa and Rhodesia, for instance.)

But even if we accept that the white majority have a degree of unearned
privilege, so what?  Maybe it’s a moral blind spot of mine, but I have
never been able to understand why “unearned” should be considered
synonymous with “unjust”, even if it might sometimes seem unfair to
some.

The injustice is not the fact that white people have privilege; it’s the fact that ethnic minorities are denied that privilege. Everyone should be able to live their lives free of race-discrimination; everyone should have equal access to jobs, to education, to housing, to public life, to cultural expression; everyone, regardless of race or ethnicity, should be able to live their life, achieve their aspirations and live up to their potential. Unfortunately, because we still live in a deeply racist society in many ways, we have not achieved these objectives.

It may just be that disproportionate arrests and convictions of ethnic
minorities are because certain offences are disproportionately committed
by ethnic minorities.  How do you know they aren’t?  What other
indicator than arrests and convictions is  there?

Victim self-report surveys like the British Crime Survey, for one (which of course are also flawed measures, but disclose a great many more crimes than the small proportion which lead to arrests and convictions). Criminology is more advanced than you seem to believe, and we know a fair amount about patterns of criminal offending.

If you believe that “certain offences are disproportionately committed by ethnic minorities”, please show some actual evidence to substantiate this claim.

A dopey sociologist who points to a British Crime Survey study “that suggested black people are no more likely than white people to report using illicit drugs”.
 Sorry, but that’s frankly risible.  Just because offences aren’t
reported by members of a particular community doesn’t mean they’re not
occurring within the community – particularly when it’s a matter of the
offenders doing the reporting!

I think you’re misunderstanding the claim. The British Crime Survey gathers data from in-depth interviews with a representative sample of 50,000 people aged 16 or over resident in private households, collecting information about any crimes of which they have been a victim in the past year. It has a whole host of methodological limitations, of course – the sample does not include children or those living in communal establishments, for one thing, and there is still likely to be some substantial under-reporting – but it’s the best comprehensive statistical source we have available at the moment. It provides information on a whole host of crimes which are never reported to police, or which do not lead to any proceedings being taken, and thus do not show up in official statistics on arrests or convictions.

I’m not sure what the basis of your claim is, therefore. Although it’s reasonable to suggest that the BCS under-reports illegal drug use, I see no reason to suppose that this effect would be greater among some ethnic groups than others. If you’re arguing that the BCS systematically over-reports drug use by whites, or systematically under-reports drug use by ethnic minorities, I’d like to see some evidence or reasoned basis for such a claim.

Yes, there are plenty of negative racial stereotypes out there – for
example that blacks are aggressive, stupid, lazy and cowardly (“feets
don’t fail me now!”).  Of course there are also positive stereotypes –
for example that blacks are athletic, virile and soulful.

All ethnic stereotypes, even “positive” ones, are toxic. Through cultural pressure, they force people into a predetermined role based on preconceptions about what “their kind of people” are “supposed” to be good at or interested in, rather than letting them live their own lives and follow their own aspirations free from externally-imposed cultural expectations or stereotypes. Your inability to see this is a consequence of your white privilege.

Suppose the leader of an African state encouraged mass immigration of
white Europeans, so that towns’ black populations found their
neighborhoods – the whole tenor of life in their country – changed
beyond recognition in just a few decades.   Suppose this was done
without consultation or consent.  And suppose any protest was officially
decreed “racist” and punished by law.

Your hypothetical is mild in comparison with what was inflicted by white Europeans on African peoples during the colonial era: enforced cultural and economic hegemony, violent political repression, relegation of native peoples to an oppressed and servile status, the plundering of natural resources for the benefit of the colonizers. And this legacy of colonialism lives on. It lives on in a world economic system in which there is vast economic inequality between Global North and Global South, and in which the latter continues to be systematically exploited for the benefit of the former. It lives on in white racism. It lives on in the worldwide political and economic power of Western multinational corporations, and their exploitation of the developing world’s resources. It lives on in unequal trade restrictions which keep the world’s rich rich and the world’s poor poor; it lives on in immigration restrictions which deny refugees and the destitute a safe haven.

(And it lives on, too, more subtly, in the ways in which colonial values continue to create repression. It’s interesting that in many Asian countries which were once under British rule, the legislative history of anti-gay laws can be traced directly to Macaulay’s Indian Penal Code; so, too, the horrific anti-gay laws in Kenya and Uganda trace their origins to British colonial laws, and the Victorian homophobic values which underlay them. Perversely, these days, gay rights campaigners who advocate an end to these laws are now regularly accused of being imperialists seeking to impose Western sexual liberalism on “traditional” African and Asian cultures – when, in reality, the very same “traditional” laws against which they are protesting are products of nineteenth-century European imperialism. But I digress.)

And, again, I have to point out that you cannot just reverse the positions of a privileged group and a non-privileged group in your hypotheticals and pretend that the situations are equivalent. Consider the obvious reason why the situation you describe has not happened, and is in no danger of happening: in our unequal world shaped by the legacy of colonialism, wealth and resources are overwhelmingly concentrated in the Global North. Migration tends to flow from poorer and less stable countries to richer and more stable ones – because human beings, everywhere, want safety, the chance to earn a reasonable living, and the opportunity to raise their families in peace. Millions are currently denied this opportunity by unjust immigration laws.

I ask you in all seriousness – how are we supposed to view the grooming
of white girls by Asian gangs, or the grotesque spectacle of “British
Muslim” fanatics calling for the destruction of Britain or hatching
terrorist plots on British soil, as “enrichments”?  How conceivably?
 It’s no answer to say “but most of them are law-abiding”.  These
problems exist, they exist here and they did not exist here before mass immigration.

It would be obscenely unjust to punish, by exclusion, an entire ethnic or religious group because of the acts of a minority of their members. You do not fear white British people as a group, or seek to exclude them from your community, because some white British people have committed and continue to commit atrocious crimes; why do you ascribe some sort of collective guilt to people of Asian origin or to Muslims? (The whole narrative, scapegoating ethnic minorities for sexual crimes in particular, also bears echoes of the kind of racist fears that motivated
the people of Maycomb County in To Kill A
Mockingbird, and their real-life counterparts in the real
miscarriages of justice upon which it was based.) Besides, immigration restrictions exclude victims of atrocities, leading to their removal to unsafe places where they will be victimized further, just as frequently as they exclude perpetrators of atrocities.

And your whole argument is premised on the assumption that crimes happening here are worse than crimes happening elsewhere, that people deemed to be a threat must be excluded to keep “us” and “our community” safe, and that it doesn’t matter what happens once they are removed from “our” little corner of the Earth’s surface. You worry more about crimes committed in England against “white girls” than about the same crimes being committed in Somalia against Somali girls. I reject that assumption; I consider it fundamentally xenophobic.  I do not consider the wellbeing of British people inherently more important than the wellbeing of Somali people, or Pakistani people, or Bangladeshi people.

Now you don’t experience a Buddhist temple or a mosque as something
alien because you are genuinely disinterested.  You look at an Oxford
college or village church and you think “oh that’s beautiful”.  You then
look at a Buddhist temple and you think “that’s beautiful too”.  The
patriot can do that as well.  But for you that’s as far as it goes,
whereas for the patriot there’s something else going on.  When he looks
at a village church he doesn’t just think “that’s beautiful” – he thinks
“that’s me, that’s part of what made me who I am”.  And in doing
so he makes a connection with countless generations long dead and as
yet unborn. 

I think this is a false dichotomy. I can recognize many things as a part of my own cultural background and my childhood experiences, and feel a special affection for them for that reason. But this does not make me afraid to expand my horizons to embrace new cultural experiences.

I must confess whenever I read Uncle Tim I start to think maybe Anders Breivik had a point

I hope you don’t mean that seriously.

While it’s tempting to write off Breivik’s violent racist ravings as products of mental illness (which they undoubtedly are), what frightens me is that his hate did not arise in a vacuum: the right-wing racist scaremongering about Muslim immigration and “Eurabia”, taken to  extremes in Breivik’s writings, is not so very far removed from the views espoused by far-right nationalists across Europe. And I fear that as economic conditions in Europe worsen, immigrants will be scapegoated further, and the hardline anti-immigration and anti-Muslim politics of the far right will grow in popularity. I genuinely fear that there may be a resurgence of fascism in Europe in my lifetime, and that Muslims will be the target just as Jews and Communists once were.

This is why speaking out against Islamophobia, and against the racism that underlies it, is so important to me. I disagree with the likes of Ophelia Benson when they deny that Islamophobia exists; it does, and it’s a terrifying threat. Muslims are scapegoated, attacked, discriminated against, and dehumanized in far-right discourse – all in the service of an anti-immigration agenda.

I don’t mean it seriously.  What ABB did was evil.  However I do think it or something like it was probably inevitable. Bella, horrida bella, Et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno …

. . .

BTW if you’ve got a spare moment I recommend these two extraordinary essays on Breivik. They’re desperately cynical, even repellant, but thought-provoking:

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2011/07/right-wing-terrorism-as-folk-activism.html

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2011/07/indisputable-humanity-of-anders-behring.html

But why do you believe that one’s community and one’s closest social relationships have to be confined to those of one’s race and ethnicity?  You keep asserting that they should, but you don’t explain why. 

But I don’t believe that. I’ve never supposed that community is confined to ethnicity.  Communities can cut across ethnic boundaries, eg communities of friendship and shared interest. They can exist within wider ethnic boundaries as regional ‘microethnicities’ (I’ve known folk who would jocularly describe themselves as  Yorkshire first and English second).  And communities can properly command greater loyalty than ethnic identity, as in the communities of family and of religion.  All I’m saying is that ethnicity is real, natural, very important to a great many people and doesn’t take kindly to being trampled on.  The point about ethnicity is that it forms the natural basis for the community of the nation because, as I’ve said, it is a collection of things that are  shared (language, history, customs, etc).  By definition a “multicultural” society no longer has those things in common and social cohesiveness is consequently weakened.  All you’re left with are nebulous concepts like “shared values” which may not in fact be shared (what values does fundamentalist Islam share with liberal democracy?) and in any case are so abstract and bloodless they’re unlikely to command the commitment necessary to overcome the various centrifugal forces in any society.  (I hasten to add that I’m not suggesting the UK’s current disintegration is down to multiculturalism alone, but I do think it is a major factor.)

I’d say living in a diverse and multicultural community has enriched my life considerably.

Well lots of people think differently.   They feel alienated and betrayed by the intrusion of strange customs and languages which have destroyed the familiarity essential to the sense of belonging.  They compare the streets then to  the same streets now and unaccountably fail to feel enriched. For my part, I can’t think of a single way in which the presence of Islam in Britain has enriched my life.  Even the prospect of Tony Blair, Rowan Williams and Richard Dawkins being beheaded only raises a wan smile.

“Diversity – coming to a neighbourhood near you”.

Getting to know people is the best way to break down prejudice against them. There are plenty of people who were raised with racist beliefs, but have learned better from living in communities alongside people from other ethnic groups and getting to know them as friends and as neighbours.

Certainly personal relationships can remove unfounded chauvinistic prejudices. And that’s good.  But I’m not talking about unfounded chauvinistic prejudices, either against individuals or cultures.  I’m talking about a.) the entirely legitimate human need to feel at home in their own country and b.) the eminently rational awareness that some cultures are fundamentally inimical to others.  I used to work in a student bookshop where I made the acquaintance of a resident academic at the university. This gentleman, an Iraqi Muslim who specialised in Egyptology, was altogether charming and civilised  (far more so than many of the white students I encountered, if I’m honest).  But that acquaintance didn’t alter my view that Islam should not be allowed to gain a foothold in this country.  Why should it?  Or take us – we’re chatting amicably enough here and I daresay we’d get on famously if we met.  Would that make you more receptive to the idea of Britain as an authoritarian confessional state?  Of course not. Nor should it.

The sole white boy sitting amid a sea of black faces in his classroom at an inner-city school is not in any sort of privileged position.

Yes, he is. He still exists in the context of a wider society which privileges white people – in the media, in the workplace and in business, in government and in public life. Schools, towns and neighbourhoods aren’t self-contained bubbles; they are part of a wider culture, and in that wider culture, white people are the privileged class.

Even if white people as a whole are the privileged class (which seems hard to reconcile with outrages like this), what good is that to the isolated white child in an inner-city who is unable to access that supposed privilege?  The fact is  that schools, towns and neighbourhoods can most certainly  become self-contained bubbles if the supposedly dominant culture is unable or unwilling to make itself felt within them.  

In 1984 Bradford headmaster Ray Honeyford warned of

the plight of those white children who constitute the ‘ethnic minority’ in a growing number of inner-city schools … [T]heir educational ‘disadvantage’ is now confirmed. It is no more than common sense, that if a school contains a disproportionate number of children for whom English is a second language … then academic standards are bound to suffer. … The absence of concern for the rights of this group of parents is due to three factors: they are overwhelmingly lower working class with little ability to articulate their social and educational anxieties; they have, so far, failed to produce a pressure group generating appropriate propaganda; and — unlike non-white children — they have no government quango to plead their cause. 

No-one listened then.  Mr Honeyford was subjected to a Maoist campaign of calumny and intimidation (“All teachers, especially those like Mr Honeyford, should be compelled to attend massive in-service training courses to bring them up to date with modern education theory, and practice, and to purge them of their racist outlook and ideology”) and hounded from his job.

In 2011 a less mild-mannered man, Anders Behring Breivik, described his own experiences of white disprivilege:

I can remember that it was a school in the City Center East, in a class where there was only a single Norwegian boy again (the majority were Muslims). Most others had taken their children out of school. The mother of this boy was, of course, a hardcore Marxist who died and life was to prove that multiculturalism and Islam will be functioning. She refused to move to another area or take him out of school. Her son would prove once and for all that Islamophobes on documents and other cultural conservatives were wrong and that it WAS possible.
The poor boy was harassed for several years until satisfactory one day he began to self harm. He told his marxistmor that he wanted to die. Only after this the mother realized that she had been wrong. The result was that they moved to another neighborhood and changing schools.

And still no-one’s listening.

A 13-year-old boy who police say was doused with gasoline and lit on fire last week while walking home from school is recovering from first-degree burns to his face and head.
The boy was just two blocks from his home in Kansas City Tuesday when two teenagers began to follow him and then attacked him, his mother, Melissa Coon, said.
Police have described the suspects as black 16-year-olds, while the victim is white.
“We were told it’s a hate crime,” Coon told KTLA.
“They rushed him on the porch as he tried to get the door open,” Coon told KMBC. “(One of them) poured the gasoline, then flicked the Bic, and said, ‘This is what you deserve. You get what you deserve, white boy.’”
By lighting the gasoline, the second attacker “produced a large fireball burning the face and hair” of the boy, according to a Kansas City Police Department report obtained by KCTV.
“It was pretty bad stuff,” Detective Stacey Taylor told the TV station, adding that police are concerned the boy may have suffered damage to his eyes and lungs.
Coon said her son put out the fire with his shirt and called 911 himself. He was rushed to the hospital and was treated for his injuries.
She believes the students also attend East High School with her son, and said he will not be returning to the school. She also told KMBC her traumatized family plans now plans to move.
“My 5-year-old came in and asked me, ‘Mom, am I going to get set on fire today?’” Coon said. “I was in tears.”

…

While this crime is making headlines, Coon states that it was merely the horrible culmination of continual racial harassment her son had to endure at East High.  Moreover, after conducting an investigation that included extensive interviews with parents and students, I’ve learned that Coon’s son is not alone.  Other white students also report a pattern of racial harassment at the high school at the hands of their peers — and, shockingly, their teachers.      
Two of these victims were the twin 14-year-old daughters (first names withheld upon request) of Karin Wildeisen.  Ever since their family relocated from Texas, they had endured racial animosity in the Kansas City school system and inappropriate behavior by staff, which included teachers laughing while boys humiliatingly manhandled the girls and a teacher slapping one of them on the backside.  But there was far worse to come.
The twins started coming home and talking about the goings-on in an advanced-English class taught by a teacher Wildeisen identifies as Ms. Veda Monday.  Wildeisen said that her daughters told her, “There are four white kids in the class; they are being targeted racially.”  They said that Monday, who is black, was feeding the class racial material, about which Wildeisen notes, “She’s teaching advanced English; she has no reason to be teaching civil rights.” But then there was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  One day, Monday allegedly showed an explicit film involving portrayals of whites lynching blacks and then, reports ex-Texan Wildeisen, “in front of the class attacked my daughters, telling them that ‘everybody from Texas is ignorant rednecks’” and that all white people were “responsible for Jasper because [their] skin is white.”  This reference is to an atrocity in Jasper, TX, in which three white men murdered a black man in 1998. …
Another white victim is 15-year-old Ashley Miller, whose family had moved to K.C., MO, from Kansas.  Subject to racial harassment, she was called names such as “white b****.”  She also actually shared a class with Allen Coon, and as the only two white students in the room, they became the target of sexual comments.  Moreover, she reports the same experience with race-baiting videos as do the Wildeisens: they would be shown, and an onus would be placed on the white students. …
Yet even putting the brutal fire attack aside, Melissa Coon’s young boy by far got the worst of it.  The tow-headed Allen looks like “the classic all-American white boy,” says his mother, and “after the first week [of school] he was nothing but racially harassed.”  She says that “he was called every racial slur you can imagine,” such as “honkey,” “cracker,” “whitey,” and “guero” (a Spanish slang term for whites that can be used in a derogatory way).  He was, she reports, pushed into lockers and was jumped in the bathroom.  And even before the recent attack, he was sometimes menaced by groups that would follow him part of the way home.
Even more damning, though, is that multiple educators were complicit in the harassment.  Mrs. Coon related an incident in which a teacher she identifies as Ms. Carla Kinder called Allen “Casper” and then “got all the students to get involved.”  Other times, the students would initiate the harassment, and the teachers would pick up the baton.  “They would tease him; people would make fun of him, and they’d chime in,” said Coon.
Then, as the Wildeisen girls report, as Ashley Miller reports, there were the race-baiting films.  Said Mrs. Coon, “They showed a lot of racial movies.  And people would make comments — lots of comments — especially at him [Allen], during these things.”

…

Because the attackers are black and the burned youth is white, some media outlets have reported the incident as a possible hate crime. However, Kansas City police have said since the incident first was reported that they do not think it was a hate crime.

It’s also worth noting, as a tangential point, that being the dominant group in a society, in a sociological sense, is not about numbers alone. It’s about power, cultural hegemony, status, perceptions. (Look at white minority rule under colonialism in much of Africa, or in late-twentieth-century South Africa and Rhodesia, for instance.)

That’s not a tangential point at all, it’s a hugely important point.  Admittedly I don’t see how it applies to our hypothetical white schoolchild, who is hardly in the position of a Verwoerd.  Then again, I do see how it effectively answers complacent claims that a given ethnic minority can’t possibly pose a threat to the UK because said ethnic minority only makes up X% of the population. 

The injustice of privilege is not the fact that the privileged enjoy benefits; it is the fact that the unprivileged are unfairly denied those benefits. Everyoneshould be able to live their lives free of race-discrimination; everyone should have equal access to jobs, to education, to housing, to public life, to cultural expression; everyone, regardless of race or ethnicity, should be able to live their life, achieve their aspirations and live up to their potential.  

If by “should” you mean “it would be nice if”, then I concur.  But of course you don’t mean that.  You mean “have an absolute right to” and this trumps all other considerations and priorities.  I disagree, if only because “politics is the art of the possible”.

Unfortunately, because we still live in a deeply racist society in many ways, we have not achieved these objectives.

Our society may be deeply  racist, but can you give me any reason to believe its racism is significantly deeper than that of any other society on earth?  You’ve expressed concern about the rise of right-wing populist xenophobia in Europe and America, so presumably those societies are deeply racist as well.  You didn’t dispute my suggestion that an African society would not be wildly enthusiastic at the prospect of mass immigration by non-Africans, so perhaps you think African society is deeply racist too.  You think China, Japan and other Asian are any different, that they would welcome mass non-Asian immigration?  One begins to wonder if every human society on earth is deeply racist.  This in turn might suggest that the problem (insofar as it is a problem) is not a social problem at all, that could be solved by a little tinkering with the structures of society, but is rooted in human nature.  Not sure what you propose to do about that, short of putting this in the drinking water.

(Happy are those who subscribe to a universalist religion like Christianity or Islam.  Their first loyalty transcends human differences and provides a counterweight to excessive exclusivity in such matters. You’ll find Christian and Muslim racists of course, but I’d wager you’ll find more ethnic diversity on  the hajj or in the College of Cardinals than at the average atheist convention.)

Victim self-report surveys like the British Crime Survey, for one (which of course are also flawed measures, but disclose a great many more crimes than the small proportion which lead to arrests and convictions). Criminology is more advanced than you seem to believe, and we know a fair amount about patterns of criminal offending. If you believe that “certain offences are disproportionately committed by ethnic minorities”, please show some actual evidence to substantiate this claim.

The British Crime Survey gathers data from in-depth interviews with a representative sample of 50,000 people aged 16 or over resident in private households, collecting information about any crimes of which they have been a victim in the past year. It has a whole host of methodological limitations, of course – the sample does not include children or those living in communal establishments, for one thing, and there is still likely to be some substantial under-reporting – but it’s the best comprehensive statistical source we have available at the moment. It provides information on a whole host of crimes which are never reported to police, or which do not lead to any proceedings being taken, and thus do not show up in official statistics on arrests or convictions.  I’m not sure what the basis of your claim is, therefore. Although it’s reasonable to suggest that the BCS under-reports illegal drug use, I see no reason to suppose that this effect would be greater among some ethnic groups than others. If you’re arguing that the BCS systematically over-reports drug use by whites, or systematically under-reports drug use by ethnic minorities, I’d like to see some evidence or reasoned basis for such a claim.

Here’s the thing.  I’m not claiming as a matter of dogmatic truth that ethnic minorities commit a disproportionate number of certain offences.  I’m saying that the figures for arrests & convictions could constitute a prima facie case that this is so.  The alternative explanation that you favour is that the criminal justice system is riddled with “institutional racism”.  Since some degree of trust in the criminal justice system is important if society is to function, this claim should not be made lightly and ought to be backed up by hard evidence.  If I understand you correctly, you’re claiming that British Crime Survey figures show no disproportionality of offending among ethnic minorities.  Therefore institutional racism.  On the other hand you admit the BCS has “methodological limitations”.  From what I understand, that’s putting it mildly.  This commentator notes, as you do, that “the pollsters have only been sampling children under 16 since January 2009, so crimes against youths haven’t been recorded “.  She also makes the following observations:

“Criminologist Marian Fitzgerald argues that the survey doesn’t capture the extent of violent crime in Britain because of information-gathering problems: ‘The people who are most at risk of crime and serious violent crime are young men in inner cities. For the last decade social surveys have found it difficult to get into these areas.’”

[Which might conceivably affect the survey's ability to assess ethnic minority offending.]

“the BCS polls homeowners, not renters. This immediately skews the results by deflecting attention from poorer neighborhoods, which are the areas likely to have the highest crime rates.”

[Which might also conceivably affect the survey's ability to assess ethnic minority offending.]

“Nor does the BCS poll the victims of sex crimes, drug crimes, crimes against commercial premises, or (obviously) murder.”

[Which would mean these categories of crime are not going to be over-reported or under-reported – they're not going to be reported at all.  Which means the survey is zero use when it comes to assessing ethnic minority offending in these categories.]

If a respondent claims to have been the victim of a particular crime more than five times in the past year, the pollsters are instructed to enter the number as five. For instance, if a homeowner in a high-crime area reports that feral youths vandalize his property every week, his report will enter the database as five crimes, not 52.

[One can see how this could have a levelling effect when it comes to relative rates of offending among ethnic groups.]

I can think of others reasons why the BCS might under-report ethnic minority crime. A desire to close ranks in the face of official questioning that could show elements of the community in a bad light, for example.  Or consider how a young female Muslim victim of domestic abuse might be reluctant to speak out for fear of reprisals from the wider Muslim community, not renowned for its chivalrous treatment of the fair sex.

contd.

All racist stereotypes, even “positive” ones, are toxic. Through cultural pressure, they force people into a predetermined role based on preconceptions about what “their kind of people” are “supposed” to be good at or interested in, rather than letting them live their own lives and follow their own aspirations free from externally-imposed cultural expectations or stereotypes.

Were Eric and Magalie living their own lives and following their own aspirations free from externally-imposed cultural expectations or were they forced into a predetermined role based on stereotypical preconceptions?

Your inability to see this is a consequence of your white privilege.

Why do you assume I’m white?

Suppose the leader of an African state encouraged mass immigration of white Europeans, so that towns’ black populations found their neighborhoods – the whole tenor of life in their country – changed beyond recognition in just a few decades.   Suppose this was done without consultation or consent.  And suppose any protest was officially decreed “racist” and punished by law. 

Your hypothetical is mild in comparison with what was inflicted by white Europeans on African peoples during the colonial era

So?  It’s still an injustice.  Are you saying modern white Europeans ought to suffer for the sins of their forefathers?  Do they have a collective inherited guilt?

And, again, I have to point out that you cannot just reverse the positions of a privileged group and a non-privileged group in your hypotheticals and pretend that the situations are equivalent. Consider the obvious reason why the situation you describe has not happened, and is in no danger of happening: in our unequal world shaped by the legacy of colonialism, wealth and resources are overwhelmingly concentrated in the Global North. Migration tends to flow from poorer and less stable countries to richer and more stable ones

If global economic inequity is all down to the legacy of colonialism, why are India and China, which both suffered imperial depredations of one kind or another, doing rather well economically?  More to the point, does these countries’ prosperity mean they have a moral obligation to throw open their borders to all comers?

 colonial values continue to create repression. It’s interesting that in many Asian countries which were once under British rule, the legislative history of anti-gay laws can be traced directly to Macaulay’s Indian Penal Code 

I’m not normally one to defend the British Empire but I would point out that the British colonial authorities also suppressed thuggee and banned suttee – I take it you approve of that?  (As for homosexuality, it would be interesting to know more about the official legal status of homosexuality in India under the  earlier Muslim rule and to what extent the situation in modern Pakistan derives from that.)

It would be obscenely unjust to punish, by exclusion, an entire ethnic or religious group because of the acts of a minority of their members. You do not fear white British people as a group, or seek to exclude them from your community, because some white British people have committed and continue to commit atrocious crimes; why do you ascribe some sort of collective guilt to people of Asian origin or to Muslims?  

 I don’t ascribe collective guilt to anyone. However I would have more sympathy for your argument if we were talking about random crimes that just happen to be committed on occasion by ethnic minorities whose victims just happen to be white on occasion.  But not only is it the case that the grooming of young girls is disproportionately committed by Asian Muslim  gangs, they also specifically target white girls.  Believe me, trying to keep this under wraps is going to cause a lot more misery to innocent Asian Muslims in the long run than honestly facing up to the facts, however unpalatable. 

Besides, immigration restrictions exclude victims of atrocities, leading to their removal to unsafe places where they will be victimized further, just as frequently as they exclude perpetrators of atrocities.

Maybe so but realistically speaking we have to draw the line somewhere.  ”Honour killing” is a feature of some Muslim cultures – should we allow every single Muslim female from those cultures to immigrate on the grounds that they are potential victims?

And your whole argument is premised on the assumption that crimes happening here are worse than crimes happening elsewhere, that people deemed to be a threat must be excluded to keep “us” and “our community” safe, and that it doesn’t matter what happens once they are removed from “our” little corner of the Earth’s surface. You worry more about crimes committed in England against “white girls” than about the same crimes being committed in Somalia against victims from that country. I reject that assumption; I consider it fundamentally xenophobic.  I do not consider the wellbeing of British people inherently more important than the wellbeing of Somali people, or Pakistani people, or Bangladeshi people. People are people. Every human life is of equal value, regardless of nationality, ethnicity, race or creed.

Why the scare quotes?  White native Britons constitute a community or collection of communities and so are entitled to refer to themselves as “us”.I agree that every human life is of equal value (despite what some leading scientists and ethicists say) and that the wellbeing of British people is, sub specie aeternitatis, inherently no more important than the wellbeing of Somali, Pakistani,  Bangladeshi, etc people.   It doesn’t follow that a government shouldn’t assign a particular priority to ensuring the wellbeing of its own citizens in the normal course of events.  We have natural circles of obligation.  I assign a greater priority to providing for my own family before others’.  If a foreign country invades my country, naturally I’m going to be more immediately concerned than if it invaded  another country. (Duh!)“Before the camps, I regarded the existence of nationality as something that shouldn’t be noticed – nationality did not really exist, only humanity. But in the camps one learns: if you belong to a successful nation you are protected and you survive. If you are part of universal humanity – too bad for you.” - Alexander Solzhenitsyn

I can recognize many things as a part of my own cultural background and my childhood experiences, and feel a special affection for them for that reason. But this does not make me afraid to expand my horizons to embrace new cultural experiences. Knowing and caring about our own cultural roots does not mean that we have to fear other cultures.

There’s more to a culture, and one’s experience of that culture, than cuisine and pretty buildings though, isn’t there?  I think you would admit that fear is an appropriate response to some cultures – you wouldn’t regard medieval Catholicism as a benign culture merely because you happen to admire the gothic cathedrals.

Certainly personal relationships can remove
unfounded chauvinistic prejudices. And that’s good.  But I’m not talking
about unfounded chauvinistic prejudices, either against individuals or
cultures.  I’m talking about a.) the entirely legitimate human need to
feel at home in one’s own country and b.) the eminently rational
awareness that some cultures are fundamentally inimical to others.  I
used to work in a student bookshop where I made the acquaintance of a
resident academic at the university. This gentleman, an Iraqi Muslim
who specialised in Egyptology, was altogether charming and civilised
 (far more so than many of the white students I encountered, if I’m
honest).  But that acquaintance didn’t alter my view that Islam should
not be allowed to gain a foothold in this country.  Why should it?

While I don’t doubt the veracity of the anecdote, it isn’t much of a defence; this reads like a more elaborate version of “Some of my best friends are black” or of the evangelical line that one should “hate the sin and love the sinner”. Ultimately,

Even if white people as a whole are the privileged class (which seems hard to reconcile with outrages like this), what good is that to the isolated white child in an inner-city who is unable to access that supposed privilege?

He or she does still access a significant degree of white privilege, because, in the modern interconnected world, he does not exist in a bubble impervious to outside influence. She or he still lives in a wider society in which most of the wealth and power is held by white people, in which political, social and cultural discourse is dominated by affluent white people, and in which the mass media which saturates our everyday lives is dominated by white people and prone to unconscious racism. He or she still lives in a society in which non-white ethnic groups have been historically disadvantaged and persecuted by centuries of institutionalized racism and violence, and in which the disparity thus created has barely even begun to narrow.

You’ve expressed concern about the rise of right-wing populist
xenophobia in Europe and America, so presumably those societies are
deeply racist as well.  You didn’t dispute my suggestion that an African
society would not be wildly enthusiastic at the prospect of mass
immigration by non-Africans, so perhaps you think African society is
deeply racist too.  You think China, Japan and other Asian are any
different, that they would welcome mass non-Asian immigration?

Tribalism is, indeed, a near-universal human characteristic, and racism is one of its most widespread manifestations. However, your next sentences…

This in turn might suggest that the problem (insofar as it is a problem)
is not a social problem at all, that could be solved by a little
tinkering with the structures of society, but is rooted in human nature.
 Not sure what you propose to do about that, short of putting this in the drinking water.

…do not follow. While racism is present in every society, we also know from experience that the power of racism in a society can be reduced, albeit gradually, by anti-racist activism, laws and policies geared at reducing racial inequality, and campaigns aimed at educating people and changing attitudes. Culture is not immutable, and it can be changed for the better. The United States in 1950 was a society with legally-entrenched racial segregation, in which African-Americans were excluded almost entirely from political and economic power, and in which racial slurs and an open belief in the inferiority of particular racial groups were commonplace in everyday discourse among the white majority. The civil rights movement, decades of protest and activism and courage and civil disobedience and hard work, changed that. Today, the United States is still a deeply racist society in many ways; but it is a great deal better than in 1950. There is no longer a formal system of racial segregation; racial minorities are legally protected against discrimination in many contexts; and explicitly-racist discourse is no longer considered socially acceptable in most mainstream circles. This is a significant improvement.

(Happy are those who subscribe to a universalist religion like
Christianity or Islam.  Their first loyalty transcends human differences
and provides a counterweight to excessive exclusivity in such matters.
You’ll find Christian and Muslim racists of course, but I’d wager you’ll
find more ethnic diversity on  the hajj or in the College of Cardinals than at the average atheist convention.)

I think you’re being a bit optimistic here. Of course it’s true that Christianity and Islam, unlike some other faiths, are in principle universalistic, insofar as they seek to convert people of all racists and creeds. But this certainly hasn’t always manifested in opposition to racism; far from it. All religions are shaped by their surrounding cultures, and religion, like everything else, is susceptible to being used as a pretext to support established prejudices and inequalities. Through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for instance, Christian evangelism and missionary work in the developing world were often couched in terms of spreading “the Good News”, along with the Western cultural norms and values which went with it, to “savage” and “barbarous” peoples who needed to be “educated” along Western lines;  indeed, this was a common justification for imperialism and colonialism, and played into the condescending racist mindset predominant at the time. So, too, churches in the Deep South, like other social institutions of the time, were long racially segregated; and the Mormon Church did not allow African-Americans to hold the priesthood until the 1970s. (I’m aware that you, as a Catholic, would regard both the Mormon faith and the Baptist and Pentecostal churches prevalent in the South as heretical perversions of your own beliefs; but I’m sure you can recognize from an objective sociological perspective that

Of course, to give Christians and Muslims their due, it’s entirely true that some of the great anti-racist activists – Martin Luther King (whose memorial in Washington DC I visited this weekend) and Desmond Tutu, for example – were motivated by a deep religious faith (specifically Christian, in both King’s and Tutu’s cases), and considered their opposition to racism to be a matter of religious conviction. Even the Catholic bishops, reactionary as they may often be on other issues, have spoken out intermittently against racism and xenophobia; the Archbishop of Los Angeles, for instance, expressed support for Las Marchas in 2006 and was a vocal opponent of the punitive anti-immigrant bill H.R. 4437, which, mercifully, did not pass. (Indeed, I’d venture to suggest that this is one respect in which the Church to which you profess allegiance is more liberal than you are.)

Nor have I ever denied that the atheist movement, dominated as it long has been by affluent upper- and middle-class white people, is sometimes prone to being blinded by race-privilege. Indeed, I’m a persistent critic of organized atheism; though I continue to identify as a non-theist, I’ve chosen to attend a Unitarian Universalist church because of its strong commitment to social justice and inclusion.

So?  It’s still an injustice.  Are you saying modern white Europeans ought to suffer for the sins of their forefathers?  Do they have a collective inherited guilt?

No. I was merely pointing out that your “hypothetical” is far milder than what actually happened to African countries.

And while there can be no such thing as collective guilt, my point is that the inequality produced by the legacy of colonialism is still with us, and that that inequality continues to be reinforced by trade and immigration restrictions that privilege the Global North at the expense of the Global South.

If global economic inequity is all down to the legacy of colonialism,
why are India and China, which both suffered imperial depredations of
one kind or another, doing rather well economically?

Both India and China have experienced rapid economic growth in recent years from a low baseline; but they began from such a low baseline precisely because of the continuing legacy of colonial exploitation. (India, for instance, was denied the opportunity to develop industrially under the British Raj, since British businesses profited from importing cotton and other raw materials for processing in Britain.) And in both countries, millions of the poor continue to live and work in appallingly exploitative conditions, making clothes, gadgets and fripperies for privileged Westerners.

More to the point, does these countries’ prosperity mean they have a moral obligation to throw open their borders to all comers?

Yes. Every country should do so. (Indeed, there is a significant flow of refugees and undocumented migrants from developing countries into other developing countries, and many suffer horrifically as a result of lack of legal status, persecution by police and immigration authorities, and dysfunctional or non-existent judicial systems. I have never claimed that the injustice of immigration controls is just a Western problem.) But Western countries, the primary beneficiaries of the present inequitable world economic system, should be the first to dismantle their racist immigration laws.

Maybe so but realistically speaking we have to draw the line somewhere.
 ”Honour killing” is a feature of some Muslim cultures – should we allow
every single Muslim female from those cultures to immigrate on the
grounds that they are potential victims?

Strawman. Even if our treatment of refugees were much more welcoming and our borders much more open (as they should be), it’s incredibly implausible to suggest that every Muslim woman in the world would want to, or would have the means to, immigrate to a Western country. It’s a classic “floodgates” argument, and, like most such arguments, is based on implausible empirical predictions.

What I am arguing is that people who do succeed in migrating to a Western country should not subsequently be deported to face the danger of violence, oppression or destitution in their home countries.

I agree that every human life is of equal value (despite what some
leading scientists and ethicists say) and that the wellbeing of British
people is, sub specie aeternitatis, inherently no more important
than the wellbeing of Somali, Pakistani,  Bangladeshi, etc people.   It
doesn’t follow that a government shouldn’t assign a particular priority
to ensuring the wellbeing of its own citizens in the normal course of
events.

Yes, it does follow. If you agree that every human life is of equal value, regardless of race or nationality, then surely it follows that we all have an individual responsibility to act accordingly – not just in our capacity as private citizens, but in our capacities as voters, activists, government officials, and so forth. Governments, like all other institutions, are run by people, and people have an obligation to do justice, using the means available to them. The obligations that attach to people’s social roles surely do not override their obligations as human beings. Most of us would agree, for instance, that a soldier can and should refuse to fight an unjust war; a police officer can and should refuse to enforce an unjust law; a teacher can and should refuse to teach a harmful falsehood; and so on. Likewise, I contend that a political actor should never put his or her loyalty to a particular nation-state before his or her obligation, as a human being, to do justice equally to all people.

Of course, you could have asked me why I believe that every human life has an equal value; and that would have been a far stronger argument, because, as you know, I’m not certain that such moral axioms can be justified in any objective sense.

We have natural circles of obligation.  I assign a greater priority to
providing for my own family before others’.  If a foreign country
invades my country, naturally I’m going to be more immediately concerned
than if it invaded  another country. (Duh!)

I struggle with the first of these. Of course almost all of us do, in at least some contexts, naturally prioritize the welfare of our own family and friends before that of strangers. I’m not at all convinced that I can come up with a compelling justification for doing so, however. Indeed, I feel a moral obligation to share my own relative prosperity with strangers – whether through taxes, charitable giving, volunteering, and giving away change to people on the streets – and frequently feel guilty about not doing as much as I should.

There is a large practical difference, though, between loyalty to one’s family and friends on the one hand, and loyalty to a nation-state or ethnic group on the other. The former is composed of people with whom, by definition, we have a personal emotional bond, and of whose needs we are keenly aware. This is not true of the nation-state or of the ethnic group, both of which are imagined communities, composed of thousands or millions of individuals whom we do not, in most cases, know personally, and with whom we have no reason to have a particular special emotional connection.

The second of your examples seems to be more prudential than moral; of course an invasion of one’s own country will be of more immediate concern because (a) one’s own safety is imperilled, and (b) one has more of an opportunity to do something about it.

“Before the camps, I regarded the existence of nationality as
something that shouldn’t be noticed – nationality did not really exist,
only humanity. But in the camps one learns: if you belong to a
successful nation you are protected and you survive. If you are part of
universal humanity – too bad for you.” - Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn was a racist and anti-Semite. Of course he was also persecuted by the Stalinist régime, and has won a degree of intellectual credibility in the West among right-wingers for that reason. But that shouldn’t blind us to his bigotry.

While I don’t doubt the veracity of the anecdote, it isn’t much of a defence; this reads like a more elaborate version of “Some of my best friends are black” or of the evangelical line that one should “hate the sin and love the sinner”. Ultimately, if you argue that a minority group should be denied particular rights and privileges that the rest of us enjoy, you have to take responsibility for that; it does not matter whether or not you harbour conscious personal animosity towards the members of that group. Just as opposing same-sex marriage is inherently a homophobic position, for instance, even if (as is common) the opponent in question does not consider himself or herself a homophobe, and bears no conscious animosity towards the gay people he or she knows personally.

You misunderstand (I think).  I didn’t give the example of my Muslim acquaintance to “defend”or “excuse” my negative attitude towards Islam, as a way of acquitting myself of the charge of “Islamophobia”.  I’m quite willing to take responsibility for my views.  Rather, I was trying to show that personal acquaintance or friendship has no bearing on the question of one’s attitude to a particular culture.  That’s why I also gave the hypothetical example of ourselves.  If you ever became friends with a Catholic (perhaps you already have Catholic friends), would that personal relationship make you more sympathetic to the Catholic worldview?  Of course it wouldn’t.  You would still reject that worldview as false and on the whole pernicious (a fortiori in the case of traditionalist Catholicism).  And would that be because you harbour a deep streak of irrational anti-Catholic bigotry (‘Catholicophobia’), which you try to excuse or rationalise by pointing out that some of your best friends are Catholics?  Of course not.  It would simply be because you recognise that your acquaintance’s worldview is essentially antithetical to your own, friendship notwithstanding.  

It’s a bit like the stock war movie character of the sympathetic Wehrmacht officer who is cultured, humane, not a monster but a good man, who nonetheless has to be fought, and maybe even killed, by the hero because he’s the enemy, dedicated to fighting in a cause opposed to the hero’s.  If the suffering of innocents is the most horrendous thing about war, the most tragic thing is that you will always find good men on opposing sides, good men on  the wrong side.

I’m also confused as to why you are so convinced that Islam and Islamic culture are “inimical” to the conservative Anglo Christian culture you seek to preserve. You’ve expressed on many occasions your personal respect for many Muslims and for aspects of Muslim faith and values, and have even acknowledged that you have more in common, when it comes to values and the place of faith in society, with many conservative Muslims than with many secular-but-culturally-Christian liberal Europeans.

That’s absolutely true.  I see a Muslim woman modestly clad in a sober yet beautiful hijab walking down the streets and compare her than to the throngs of pierced, tattooed fake-tan muffin-tops wobbling along with their arses hanging out of their shorts and obscene slogans on their T-shirts, and the shahada arises unbidden on my lips.  (Well maybe not quite.)  But the thing is, my reaction to the muffin-tops is not one of alienated hostility but of shame that they (or their parents or parents’ parents) have thrown away the pearl of great price that they inherited from their Christian forebears and so humiliated themselves before the infidel. To ask why I, qua religious conservative, should be concerned about  conservative religious Islam’s impact on the liberal secular West is like asking the supporter of an unsuccessful football team why he doesn’t transfer his allegiance to the more successful rival team since they keep on beating his team. To ask is to fail to grasp the nature of allegiance.  (It goes without saying that I would very much like it if my team did win; if the West stopped being liberal and secular.)

Why, then, do you harbour such a specific fear of Islam as a threat? Of course it could be because Islam is a competitor of Catholicism, and you consider Catholicism to be the only true creed and are thus concerned to protect it from competition in the interest of saving souls.

In a nutshell, yes.  Above and beyond all cultural loyalties, that is what finally matters.

But if that is so, why do you not harbour similar fears about, say, Evangelical Protestants, Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses – all of whom you must equally consider to be adherents of dangerous heresies? Why are you not arguing that the building of a Mormon temple in Preston, and the growth of door-to-door evangelism by Jehovah’s Witnesses, are threats to British culture which ought to be forcibly suppressed? Why is it specifically Islam which frightens you?

Because Islam seems to me to be a far more formidable enemy than those sects.  For all their occasional vigour, they  lack deep intellectual or aesthetic roots; but Islam is more than just a religion or religious sect, it is a religious culture of great age and weight.  And while its classical political expression, the Caliphate, currently appears as defunct as the old Holy Roman Empire, the religion has not experienced any corresponding decline in extent of practice (unlike Christianity), despite the best efforts of  secularisers. 

Now if one looks at Islam’s history, one sees a consistent pattern of aggressive military expansion.  It began in the 7th century by tearing great chunks from the Christian Byzantine Empire – first with the conquests of Syria and Palestine, then Egypt.  At the same time its eastward expansion destroyed the ancient Persian Empire that had been Rome’s old enemy, bringing it to the borders of India.  In the 8th century, it expanded into Central Asia, including Afghanistan, reaching the borders of China.  In the West, Muslim armies overran the rest of Roman North Africa, reaching the Atlantic, and from there surged north to destroy the Christian Visigothic kingdom of Spain. Penetration of southern France was only halted when Charles Martel saved Christian Europe by his victory at the Battle of Poitiers (AD732) – the first time the Islamic steamroller stalled.  

Following this hiccup, succeeding centuries saw the conquest or penetration of Sicily, Asia Minor, Greece and the Balkans, Hungary, Indonesia, India and the Philippines. Pirate raids by Muslim corsairs operating out of North Africa seeking European slaves were a far-reaching menace until even the early 19th century. 

Two things are noteworthy about this history – the extraordinary persistence of the Islamic military expansion over a very great span of time and space; and the fact that for the greater part of that time Christian Europe was on the defensive.  Although Sicily, Spain and (for a time) parts of the Holy Land were retaken, there was a very real sense that Christendom was under siege and at times came close to extinction. Apart from the Battle of Poitiers, two dates can be seen as particularly providential: AD1571, when the defeat of Ottoman naval forces in the Battle of Lepanto  prevented Muslim power from dominating the Mediterranean and so menacing Italy; and the Battle of Vienna where the Ottoman siege of that city was decisively repelled in AD1683 – less than a century before the American Declaration of Independence.

The Catholic historian Belloc called Islam simply “the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilisation has had”.

(All due proportion kept, of course.  In the wider eschatological scheme of things, Islam is just a sideshow; it certainly won’t be the final enemy the Church  faces.  It just happens to be a real and present danger at the current time.)

Even if white people as a whole are the privileged class … what good is that to the isolated white child in an inner-city who is unable to access that supposed privilege?

He or she does still access a significant degree of white privilege, because, in the modern interconnected world, he does not exist in a bubble impervious to outside influence. She or he still lives in a wider society in which most of the wealth and power is held by white people, in which political, social and cultural discourse is dominated by affluent white people

 That modern interconnected world ceases to exist when there’s a knife in your ribs. Cultural discourse is irrelevant when you’re running for your life.  You might as well be in an impervious bubble.  

and in which the mass media which saturates our everyday lives is dominated by white people and prone to promoting racist stereotypes 

Agreed.  The white-dominated mass media is very prone to promoting racist stereotypes, primarily anti-white ones.

He or she still lives in a society in which non-white ethnic groups have been historically disadvantaged and persecuted by centuries of institutionalized racism and violence, and in which the disparity thus created has barely even begun to narrow.

They’re on the case.

While racism is present in every society, we also know from experience that the power of racism in a society can be reduced, albeit gradually, by anti-racist activism, laws and policies geared at reducing racial inequality, and campaigns aimed at educating people and changing attitudes. Culture is not immutable, and it can be changed for the better. The United States in 1950 was a society with legally-entrenched racial segregation, in which African-Americans were excluded almost entirely from political and economic power, and in which racial slurs and an open belief in the inferiority of particular racial groups were commonplace in everyday discourse among the white majority. The civil rights movement, decades of protest and activism and courage and civil disobedience and hard work, changed that. Today, the United States is still a deeply racist society in many ways; but it is a great deal better than in 1950. There is no longer a formal system of racial segregation; racial minorities are legally protected against discrimination in many contexts; and explicitly-racist discourse is no longer considered socially acceptable in most mainstream circles. This is a significant improvement.

The downside of that happy ending is the tsunami of black-on-white violence of recent years (much of it racially motivated); the increasing grassroots white awareness of, and willingness to speak about, this phenomenon; and the consequent contempt for the MSM’s deafening silence on this issue in favour of the official manufactured cult of Trayvianity.

In many ways, the United States seems more racially polarised than ever. I am no apologist for white America’s history of slavery, nor for the injustices of Jim Crow era, nor do I think the situation can be adequately explained merely by invoking ‘race’.  But neither do I think it can be explained merely by invoking ‘racism’.  At any rate, John Derbyshire’s recent interview comments have the sad ring of truth:

“My own sense of the thing is that underneath the happy talk, underneath the dogged adherence to failed ideas and dead theories, underneath the shrieking and anathematizing at people like me, there is a deep and cold despair. In our innermost hearts,we don’t believe racial harmony can be attained. Hence the trend to separation. We just want to get on with our lives away from each other. Yet for a moralistic, optimistic people like Americans, this despair is unbearable. It’s pushed away somewhere we don’t have to think about it.”

“I am of a certain age, and I was around 50 years ago. I was reading the newspapers and following world events and I remember the civil rights movement. I was in England, but we followed it. I remember it, I remember what we felt about it, and what people were writing about it. It was full of hope. The idea in everyone’s mind was that if we strike down these unjust laws and we outlaw all this discrimination, then we’ll be whole. Then America will be made whole. After an intermediate period of a few years, who knows, maybe 20 years, with a hand up from things like affirmative action, black America will just merge into the general population and the whole thing will just go away. That’s what everybody believed. Everybody thought that. And it didn’t happen. Here we are, we’re 50 years later, and we’ve still got these tremendous disparities in crime rates, educational attainment, and so on. And I think, although they’re still mouthing the platitudes, Americans in their hearts feel a kind of cold despair about it. They feel that Thomas Jefferson was probably right and we can’t live together in harmony. I think that’s why you see this slow ethnic disaggregation. We have a very segregated school system now. There are schools within 10 miles of where I’m sitting that are 98 percent minority. In residential housing too, it’s the same thing. So I think there is a cold, dark despair lurking in America’s collective heart about the whole thing.”

Through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for instance, Christian evangelism and missionary work in the developing world were often couched in terms of spreading “the Good News”, along with the Western cultural norms and values which went with it, to “savage” and “barbarous” peoples who needed to be “educated” along Western lines;  indeed, this was a common justification for imperialism and colonialism, and played into the racist mindset predominant at the time.

Hmmm.  Your use of the term “developing world” suggests non-Western cultures were/are somehow “less developed” than Western cultures and that it is urgently necessary for their wellbeing that they “develop” along Western lines … Reminds me of an amusing bit of dialogue from the movie Blackrobe, where the young Jesuit missionary meets an old priest with a hideously scarred face:

“The savages did this to me.”

“The Indians? Why?”

“They are uncivilized – just as the English or Germans were before we came to them!”

A liturgically conservative Catholic blog recently posted some photos of a modern Tridentine Mass in Africa.  One commentator complained:  … is it really necessary that a Mass in Gabon replicate something from 18th century Rome, even down to the lace collars around the altar boys’ necks? I can understand when it comes to things that are actually part of the rite (chant, language, rubrics, vestments etc.), but why does there have to be such a rigid aesthetic in place that resists any of the organic adaptations Roman Christianity has made to West African culture? This might have worked in the days when every prelate in Africa was a white, but in the 21st century, it reeks of colonialism, even when the celebrant is African himself.

That comment brought forth this reply:  … your ignorant comment has made me furious. How dare you insinuate that ‘rigid aesthetics’ is not part of West African culture, or that it is not fitting to be incorporated in the liturgical life of the Church in Africa. What do you know about Africa for you to make such a statement? Should you not be happy that a few thousand miles away, in a culture that does not resemble anything in the West, we can surely identify ourselves as who we are? We are ‘Roman’ Catholics. What would you rather have us wear? Feathers and loin cloth? Or perhaps that is too base. What about a sheet of cloth with a cut out to fit over our heads? And what would you have religious people like the Franciscans and Dominicans wear to give them a more ‘African’ feel to them? Priests in my country of Nigeria where brought up by well meaning Irish priests. In poor villages that had nothing, people chipped in to provide the priests and other missionaries with whatever they needed to give us our own identity as CatholicsAnd so, we received our faith from the missionaries with much humility, accepting all that was given to us and rejecting nothing out of pride. The Church in the West brought to us this splendid gift and we took it–even with the Latin and vestments and the new order of things. I grew up with Latin and marvelous westernized vestments and our Cathedral was in Gothic style–do you have a problem with that too? It reminded me not of colonialism, but of the universality of our Church and our link even to the Pope himself. If an African prelate becomes pope, I suppose he should don a shaman attire more closely suited to the identity of his tribe too.
What stinks of colonialism is our civil government. It is what the English used to import its terrible democratic republic rule into our country by force and turned us into a country that would always be in turmoil. Subsidiarity was forced out as a principle and changed the way Africans conducted their lives–not the Church. The Church for us has always been the institution that gave us alleviation from the encroachment of colonialism.

Indeed, I’d venture to suggest that this is one respect in which the Church to which you profess allegiance is more liberal than you are.

You’re right, although I would say “current clerical hierarchy” rather than “Church”.  Ditto the current clerical hierarchy’s opposition to the death penalty. Ever since the ‘Devil’s Council’ of the Sixties the RCC has been a sleeping giant, but there are a few hopeful signs Theoden might be awakening from his Wormtongue-induced stupor. 

Indeed, I’m a persistent critic of organized atheism; though I continue to identify as a non-theist, I’ve chosen to attend a Unitarian Universalist church because of its strong commitment to social justice and inclusion.

I’m actually rather curious as to why you would do that.  I mean, I can understand that you feel you have more in common with a liberal Christian than an authoritarian or racist atheist; and that you’d rather collaborate with the former to advance the cause of social justice, which you see as being of more pressing moment than the cause of atheism.  But why actually attend their church services?  Are they aesthetically pleasing?

the gross inequality produced by the legacy of Western imperialism and colonialism is still with us, and that that inequality continues to be reinforced by trade and immigration restrictions that privilege the Global North at the expense of the Global South. We have a moral duty to redress that inequality, even – especially – if it means surrendering some of our own artificially-maintained Western privilege. … And in both countries, millions of the poor continue to live and work in appallingly exploitative conditions, making clothes, gadgets and fripperies for privileged Westerners. … Western countries, the primary beneficiaries of the present inequitable world economic system, should be the first to dismantle their racist immigration laws.

I take it you believe in equality …

More seriously, it may well be the case that an unjust economic system enriches country A at the expense of country B, but I don’t see how that imbalance is going to be corrected by allowing unrestricted immigration from B to A.  Country B will continue to be exploited – and perhaps even crippled economically by the exodus – while country A will suffer severe social strain as a result of the influx, which benefits neither natives nor immigrants.  The root problem is not immigration controls but an exploitative economic system.  And of course the whole issue is complicated by the rise of a so-called ‘global economy’ which floats above national boundaries.  In the days of Empire, capitalism may well have involved country A directly exploiting country B.  Nowadays a company nominally based in country A is quite happy to inflict economic and social hardship on that same country A by outsourcing its operations to country B, where cheap labour is plentiful.

A while back on Pharyngula you derided my “romantic neo-feudalism”, emphasising the unprecedented prosperity and freedom brought about by industrial capitalism.  Maybe that was during your libertarian phase.  Now you seem more inclined to criticise Western consumers’ insatiable demand for “gadgets and fripperies”.  Well then, direct your fire at hedonistic consumerism and the global economy that fuels it rather than nativist sentiment – which, after all, is as much a victim of the global system as the world’s poor.  (Indeed, it is precisely nativist sentiment in the non-Western world, whether nationalist, Islamic or both, which stands most in opposition to the inequities of the global economic order.)

[contd]

If you agree that every human life is of equal value, regardless of race or nationality, then surely it follows that we all have an individual responsibility to act accordingly – not just in our capacity as private citizens, but in our capacities as voters, activists, government officials, and so forth. Governments, like all other institutions, are run by people, and people have an obligation to do justice, using the means available to them. The obligations that attach to people’s social roles surely do not override their obligations as human beings. Most of us would agree, for instance, that a soldier can and should refuse to fight an unjust war; a police officer can and should refuse to enforce an unjust law; a teacher can and should refuse to teach a harmful falsehood; and so on. Likewise, I contend that a political actor should never put his or her loyalty to a particular nation-state before his or her obligation, as a human being, to do justice equally to all people.

&

Of course almost all of us do, in at least some contexts, naturally prioritize the welfare of our own family and friends before that of strangers. I’m not at all convinced that I can come up with a compelling justification for doing so, however. Indeed, I feel a moral obligation to share my own relative prosperity with strangers – whether through taxes, charitable giving, volunteering, and giving away change to people on the streets – and frequently feel guilty about not doing as much as I should. … I’d also add that we do justly criticize those who elevate their own family’s welfare above all other considerations

I don’t think it’s quite that simple.  I wouldn’t say the natural ‘circles of obligation’ to family and country override all other considerations.  They certainly don’t override the moral law.  Christian teaching holds that an individual is morally obliged to obey his lawful superiors whether they be parental, secular or ecclesiastical. But Christian teaching also holds that an individual is morally obliged to disobey and resist those same lawful superiors if they order him to commit sin.  So the proper loyalty due to family cannot be used to justify corrupt nepotism or participation in a criminal enterprise, for example.  Proper loyalty to the state (or king) cannot be used to justify participation in a war of unprovoked aggression or the persecution of innocents.

The ’circles of obligation’ are not based on a denial of the principle of moral equality between individuals.  They are based on principles of practical rather than theoretical reason, “prudential [rather] than moral” as you put it.  On such principle is the purely logistical one of  opportunity and means.  In the normal course of events, my opportunity and means to directly and effectively help others diminish the further removed those other people are from my immediate circles of family and community.  A second practical principle is that of motive.  One of the insights of the Burkean conservative tradition is that ‘prejudice’ (call it natural emotional attachment) provides a stronger impetus to effective action than mere intellectual assent to abstract principles.  Obviously this isn’t to advocate irrationalism or elevate ‘prejudice’ to the position of overriding moral arbiter.  It’s an experiential observation of what spurs people to action in the real world of real relationships.  Any programme of policy that disregards these practical principles is unlikely to be effective.

I think one can simultaneously hold to the theoretical principle of universal moral equality/equivalence and the practical principles of real-world effectiveness without prejudice to either.  So one can say that a British government has an obligation to put the interests of British nationals before those of Somali nationals. At the same time, if a Somali national were murdered on British soil, the British authorities have an obligation to treat that as seriously as the murder of a British citizen.  If the Somali’s murderer turns out to be a British citizen, he should hang (or, if you prefer, undergo a therapeutic process of healing and reconciliation with a view to his eventual rehabilitation).

Obviously, the real world being what it is, real-world situations are going to throw up ethical dilemmas which make it hard to strike the correct balance.  We must strive to steer a course between self-centered cynicism and gullible naivety. Suppose I see an individual fleeing an angry mob. If I know that individual is innocent of any wrongdoing, I would say I am morally obliged to offer him shelter in my home, even though I might thereby put myself and my family in danger of incurring the wrath of the mob.  (Whether I would have the courage to do so is another matter.)  If I know the individual is a mass murderer, I would say I am morally obliged not to let him in my house under any circumstances.  But of course, chances are I know nothing about the individual in question.  What then should I do?  All I can do is make a prudential decision (perhaps based on my perception of the individual’s demeanour and that of his pursuers) which may turn out to be the wrong decision.

for instance, upper-middle-class types who agitate for lower taxes so that they can send their children to the best private schools, and who flee to gated communities so that their precious offspring won’t have to mix with the great unwashed. This seems analogous to the selfishness that underlies protectionist immigration restrictions.

Since decades of liberalism have made the streets unsafe, I can’t say I blame them.  At least such people don’t exhibit the hypocrisy of affluent upper-middle-class leftists with a regular column in the Guardian, a regular seat on the Question Time panel and regular holidays at their villa in Tuscany; who extol the principle of comprehensive education while sending their children to the local high-achieving CoE school (with regret, naturally, but one doesn’t want one’s precious offspring to suffer academically or worse); and who recoil in horror from those ghastly working-class racists while making sure they themselves live in a leafy enclave where they’re less likely to run into the more vibrant London nightlife.

There is a large practical difference, though, between loyalty to one’s family and friends on the one hand, and loyalty to a nation-state or ethnic group on the other. The former is composed of people with whom, by definition, we have a personal emotional bond, and whose suffering is directly present in our lives and impacts us emotionally. This is not true of the nation-state or of the ethnic group, both of which are abstract communities, composed of thousands or millions of individuals whom we do not, in most cases, know personally, and with whom we have no reason to have a particular special emotional connection. The traditionalist conservative conception of the nation-state as a great extended family has always been romantic metaphor rather than reality.

I agree that familial metaphors are just that – metaphors – but I disagree that nations/ethnic groups are therefore mere abstractions.  Obviously, love for and loyalty to a nation isn’t a matter of knowing every member of that nation personally or having an emotional connection with them as individuals.  It’s about identification with the culture and history of the nation, a culture and history that is manifested in a myriad concrete (not abstract) customs and artefacts. 

Solzhenitsyn was a racist and anti-Semite. 

I don’t believe that’s the case, but even if it were true it wouldn’t mean he had nothing worthwhile to say.  I’m told MLK had some very unsavoury aspects to his personality.

The downside of that happy ending is the
tsunami of black-on-white violence of recent years (much of it racially
motivated); the increasing grassroots white awareness of, and willingness to
speak about, this phenomenon; and the consequent contempt for the MSM’s
deafening silence on this issue in favour of the official manufactured cult of
Trayvianity.

This is an absurd claim. Do you have any evidence for it,
besides right-wing scaremongering?

[quoting Derbyshire:] Here we are,
we’re 50 years later, and we’ve still got these tremendous disparities in crime
rates, educational attainment, and so on.

Because of the
legacy of past institutionalized racist oppression, and the continuing effects
of present racism. This cartoon comes to mind. These
disparities do not exist in a vacuum, and they are not the result of a level
playing field.

Hmmm.  Your use of the term “developing
world” suggests non-Western cultures were/are somehow “less
developed” than Western cultures and that it is urgently necessary for
their wellbeing that they “develop” along Western
lines

Perhaps it does; the terminology that we’re all taught to
use may well unconsciously reflect the racist and colonialist assumptions built
into our discourse.

But you misunderstand me, I think. I wasn’t saying that
evangelism for Christianity (or for any other religion) is inherently
an act of cultural imperialism. It obviously isn’t. (That would be analogous to
Be Scofield’s complaint that atheists are engaging in cultural imperialism by
promoting atheism; in both cases, it’s a bad argument.) Trying to convince
someone else that your own religious worldview is the correct one isn’t in
itself an act of imperialism. 

Rather, I’m simply pointing out, as a historical matter,
that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western Christian evangelism in Africa
and Asia, specifically, was deeply intertwined with
imperialism, colonialism, racist ideology, and the paternalistic desire to
“civilize the natives”. Christianity was far from the only factor, of
course – eugenicist theories about the “inferiority” of certain races
were also popular at the time. But it would be foolish to deny the historical
link, in the specific historical context we’re talking about, between Christian
missionary work and imperialism. This isn’t a judgment about Christianity as a
whole; it’s a judgment about the way in which specific Christian movements, in a
specific historical context, served to reinforce existing oppression.  (One could equally think of occasions in which
Christian movements have served as liberating forces for oppressed peoples,
like African-American churches in the American civil rights movement, or
liberation theology in Latin America.)

You’re right, although I would say “current
clerical hierarchy” rather than “Church”.  Ditto
the current clerical hierarchy’s opposition to the death
penalty.

A few weeks ago, I was at a rally in support of Noelia
Ramos, who was facing deportation to Honduras, despite having
two young children in this country who are American citizens. The rally was
also attended by a Roman Catholic priest, from her church in New Bedford, who
was participating in the campaign to save her from being deported. (Thankfully,
the campaign was successful; she has been granted a stay of deportation for a
year.)  And the Catholic bishops have
also filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court opposing Arizona’s SB
1070, the appalling anti-immigrant bill.

As much as I disagree with the Catholic clergy on most
things, they do, at least, recognize that immigration enforcement is tearing
apart families and communities, and have spoken out against deportations. As
they should. If you really believe in family values, you ought to be the first
to oppose laws which lead, quite often, to parents being forcibly separated
from their children; if you really believe that human life is sacred, you ought
to be the first to oppose deporting people to countries where they face death.

Of course many Catholics in the US are Latino and Latina
immigrants, and this no doubt makes a difference to the generally-pro-immigrant
positions of the US Catholic hierarchy; I haven’t heard of the Catholic
hierarchy in Britain taking a strong position against our equally-grotesque
immigration laws.  I’m not heaping praise
on Catholicism here, by any means. But I’m bemused that you can reconcile your
anti-immigrant stance with your Catholic beliefs.

Perhaps your opposition to immigration is restricted to
Muslim immigration. You’ve explained clearly enough why you
fear Islam, specifically. But if this is so, why do you never draw this
distinction? You’ve attacked “mass immigration”, and made common
cause with right-wing opponents of immigration (including out-and-out racists
like John Derbyshire), without distinguishing according to the faith of the
immigrants concerned. If your fear is specifically of Islam and Islamic culture,
rather than being rooted in general xenophobia, why are you not supportive of
immigrants’ rights with regard to Christian immigrants from
Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean, of whom there are plenty in both
Britain and America?

More seriously, it may well be the case
that an unjust economic system enriches country A at the expense of country B,
but I don’t see how that imbalance is going to be corrected by
allowing unrestricted immigration from B to A.

In isolation, it won’t. I think you’re missing my point somewhat.
The point is that, as long as these vast disparities in living conditions
exist, as long as large parts of the planet are blighted by war and suffering
and poverty, people are going to migrate in order to escape suffering and build
a better life for their families. As any of us would do, given those
circumstances. But under the current regime of rigid immigration control, they
are often severely punished for doing so. Irregular migrants live with the
constant fear of being arrested, detained and deported. Many are locked up in
detention centres and treated as though they were criminals. Some are summarily
deported at the border and never get a chance to make claims for asylum. Some
die trying to cross borders illegally. Some are forcibly separated from their
families, with children being left without parents and, in some cases, whole
communities being torn apart. Some are subjected to appalling exploitation in
the informal labour market. I know you know this perfectly well, because I’ve
written about this extensively, with evidence and examples from multiple
countries, on this very blog, and you’ve never sought to deny the reality of
the suffering caused by immigration restrictions.

Would getting rid of exclusionary immigration laws magically
fix all the world’s problems overnight? No. And no one claims that it would.
What it would do is free irregular migrants from the
violence, stigma and marginalization they currently face, and give them a
chance to live peacefully with their families and to build lives in the
countries they have chosen as their homes. That’s important.

Of course it isn’t enough on its own. Of course we also need
to work for global economic justice. But an open-door policy on immigration,
coupled with legalization for those already here, would help
to make a lot of individual people’s lives a hell of a lot better.

The ’circles of obligation’ are not
based on a denial of the principle of moral equality between individuals.
 They are based on principles of practical rather than theoretical reason,
“prudential [rather] than moral” as you put it.  On such
principle is the purely logistical one of  opportunity and means.
 In the normal course of events, my opportunity and means to directly and
effectively help others diminish the further removed those other people are
from my immediate circles of family and community.

It’s obviously true that, on a purely practical level, we
all prioritize those moral causes which we actually have the opportunity to
affect. And for this reason it’s obviously true that we tend to pay the closest
attention to events in our own states and communities.

But your conclusions don’t follow from this premise. It’s
undoubtedly reasonable to say that the British state has less moral responsibility
for the wellbeing of a Somali national in Somalia than for that of a British
national in Britain, because a state’s responsibility for people’s wellbeing must
be proportionate to its actual control over their lives. (Though less
responsibility doesn’t mean no responsibility; I’d argue
that wealthy nations have a moral responsibility to spend money on foreign
development aid, for example.) But it doesn’t follow that the British state has
less responsibility for the wellbeing of a Somali national in Britain than for that of a
British national in Britain. When both are equally within its territory and
under its control, your argument no longer holds. And it certainly doesn’t
follow that the British state is justified in jailing said Somali national at
Campsfield House or Yarl’s Wood, and forcibly returning her to Somalia against
her will, in order to protect some perceived national interest of British people.

A second practical principle is that of motive.
 One of the insights of the Burkean conservative tradition is that
‘prejudice’ (call it natural emotional attachment) provides a stronger impetus
to effective action than mere intellectual assent to abstract principles.
 Obviously this isn’t to advocate irrationalism or elevate ‘prejudice’ to
the position of overriding moral arbiter.  It’s an experiential
observation of what spurs people to action in the real world of real
relationships.  Any programme of policy that disregards these practical
principles is unlikely to be effective.

But this prejudice, I think, is something that can be
overcome. Most people, faced with the real harrowing human stories of the
individuals harmed by harsh immigration enforcement, would feel horror and
sympathy. Few people are likely to be unmoved by the experiences of the women
of Yarl’s Wood, or by  this
woman’s testimony and the documentary of which it forms a part
(other clips can be found on YouTube). Faced with horrors like this, most
people will be emotionally motivated to do something about it – as I have been.
One doesn’t have to rely on “intellectual assent to abstract
principles”; one can feel compassion for a fellow human being who has
suffered horrors at the hands of one’s government.

The reason the public can muster little sympathy for
immigrants is, in part, because they don’t know the truth; those members of the
public who get their news from Fox News or the Daily Express,
say, tend to internalize pernicious myths about immigrants and immigration. Most
people on both sides of the Atlantic are woefully unaware of the real
consequences of immigration laws, or the real lives of the people involved.

I think one can simultaneously hold to
the theoretical principle of universal moral equality/equivalence and the
practical principles of real-world effectiveness without prejudice to either.
 So one can say that a British government has an obligation to put the
interests of British nationals before those of Somali nationals. At the same
time, if a Somali national were murdered on British soil, the British
authorities have an obligation to treat that as seriously as the murder of a British
citizen.  If the Somali’s murderer turns out to be a British citizen, he
should hang (or, if you prefer, undergo a therapeutic process of healing and
reconciliation with a view to his eventual rehabilitation).

But it seems that you’re simply drawing an arbitrary line.
You think the British state should protect your hypothetical Somali national
against being murdered on British soil (with which I agree, obviously); yet
you’re happy for the British state to lock her up and deport her to Somalia
against her will, where she may well face death or inhuman treatment, merely
because she happens to be Somali and not British. Why do you draw the line
where you draw it?

(You’ve never been very specific about what kind of
immigration control regime you’d prefer, but since you find the status quo too
permissive, I assume that you want to get rid of the Refugee Convention, the
protection of asylum-seekers and the non-refoulement principle. And you surely
have to recognize that if Britain stopped taking in asylum-seekers, the result
would be more people being deported to places where they would be murdered,
tortured, or both. I wish you’d pay more attention to the reality of what
immigration enforcement actually involves; I’ll draw your attention to what I
said at Jadehawk’s blog here. )

A while back on Pharyngula you derided my
“romantic neo-feudalism”, emphasising the unprecedented prosperity
and freedom brought about by industrial capitalism.  Maybe that was during
your libertarian phase.  Now you seem more inclined to criticise Western
consumers’ insatiable demand for “gadgets and fripperies”.  Well
then, direct your fire at hedonistic consumerism and the global economy that
fuels it rather than nativist sentiment – which, after all, is as much a victim
of the global system as the world’s poor.

I certainly don’t oppose international trade and commerce,
nor do I want to return to feudalism or to a pre-industrial era.  What I oppose is the vast economic disparities
between the richest and the poorest, both within countries and between them. There’s
nothing wrong, in themselves, with gadgets and fripperies; but I want the
people making them to be paid a living wage, to unionize, and to work in decent
working conditions.

And at the moment, while capital has virtually unlimited mobility,
labour does not. Businesses can move wherever they wish and trade wherever they
wish; but workers are tied to the places of their birth, and are labelled
“illegals” and faced with harsh sanctions if they cross a border
without permission in order to make a living. The solution to this is not to
make businesses less free to move, which would be a backward
step, but to make workers more free to move.

I’m actually rather curious as to why you would do that.  I mean, I can
understand that you feel you have more in common with a liberal
Christian than an authoritarian or racist atheist; and that you’d rather
collaborate with the former to advance the cause of social justice,
which you see as being of more pressing moment than the cause
of atheism.  But why actually attend their church services?  Are they
aesthetically pleasing?

Bear in mind that Unitarian Universalism is not a Christian denomination, although it has historical roots in liberal Christianity. Rather, it’s a non-creedal religious community in which non-theists are welcomed, as are people with a variety of different religious and spiritual beliefs.

See the Unitarian Universalist Association website, which explains more about the UU religious tradition.

 Some more empirical evidence for you:

Race variations in jail sentences