Satnam Virdee - Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider

Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider

Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider

Satnam Virdee

University of Glasgow, UK

Satnam Virdee 2014

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First published 2014 by

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Printed in China

In loving memory of my grandparents

Contents

Acknowledgements

A book that ranges across two centuries inevitably incurs many debts along the way. I have been extremely fortunate to have benefited from the generous support and advice of a number of friends and colleagues including Laurence Brown, Peter Fairbrother, Ben Gidley, Keith Grint, Rick Halpern, Lynn Jamieson, Steve Jefferys, Rick Kuhn, Sian Moore, Craig Phelan, Liliana Riga, David Renton, Sheila Rowbotham, Evan Smith, John Solomos, Tim Strangleman, Rodolfo D. Torres, Matt Worley, John Wrench and Erik Olin Wright. Special thanks also to all the staff and postgraduates of the Centre for Research on Racism, Ethnicity and Nationalism (CRREN) at the University of Glasgow, in particular Stephen Ashe, Neil Davidson, Bridget Fowler, Robert Gibb, Brendan McGeever and Andrew Smith. I hope those endless hours of argument and debate over copious amounts of tea and coffee proved as enlightening for you as they were for me. I am extremely grateful to Honor Hania the university librarian who located references that no one else could, and Mike French then head of the School of Social and Political Sciences who helped facilitate the completion of this project by granting me a short period of study leave that took me away from chairing the Sociology Department at just the right time. Emily Salz at Palgrave Macmillan commissioned this book, while Anna Reeve, Lloyd Langman and especially Nicola Cattini have been the perfect editors helping smooth the path to publication. In those fleeting moments of doubt that inevitably arise over the course of writing a book of this kind, it has been the music of Asha Bhosle, Jimmy Cliff and Curtis Mayfield that has inspired me to keep on keeping on. Finally, I thank the members of my family, who have supported me throughout this journey, particularly my parents, parents-in-law, sisters, sister-in-law, brother-in-law and nieces. And most of all, LV and CV who have lived with this book for far too long, and whose love and humour (often at my expense!) helped bring it to completion. I am forever grateful.

The author and publisher would like to thank the copyright holders for permission to reproduce material from the following sources:

De Beauvoir, S. 1976. The Ethics of Ambiguity. New York: Citadel Press (reprinted by permission of Kensington Publishing Corp.);

Colley, L. 1986. Whose Nation? Class and National Consciousness in Britain 17501830, Past and Present 113: 1. Oxford: Oxford Journals (reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press);

Thompson, E. P. 1965. The Peculiarities of the English, Socialist Register 2 (reprinted by permission of the Socialist Register);

Anderson, P. 1964. Origins of the Present Crisis, New Left Review 1: 23 (reprinted by permission of the New Left Review);

May, R. and Cohen, R. 1974. The Interaction Between Race and Colonialism: A Case Study of the Liverpool Race Riots of 1919, Race and Class 16: 2. London: Sage Journals (reprinted by permission of the Institute of Race Relations);

Nairn, T. 1970. Enoch Powell: The New Right, New Left Review 1: 61 (reprinted by permission of the New Left Review);

Sivanandan, A. 1977. The Liberation of the Black Intellectual, Race and Class 18: 4. London: Sage Journals (reprinted by permission of the Institute of Race Relations);

Widgery, D. 1986. Beating Time. London: Vintage (reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited and also by kind permission of Juliet Ash);

A speech made by Margaret Thatcher at the Press Conference for American correspondents in London, 25 June 1980 (reprinted by permission of the Margaret Thatcher Foundation).

Introduction

We cannot go forward unless we know our yesterdays.

(Alfred Rosmer cited in Tarbuck 1991: 43)

To will oneself free is also to will others free.

(Simone De Beauvoir 1948/1976: 73)

Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider is a critical analysis of working class efforts to secure economic and social justice and democratize English society. Unlike most studies of the English working class, however, this volume investigates these social and political struggles through the prism of race. Through an insistence that race is a central, not peripheral, part of the way things work (Knowles 2003: 1011), my intention is to contribute further to unsettling the academic consensus which equates the history and making of the working class in England with the white male worker (see for example Scott 1986; Taylor 1991; Hall 1992).

From the seventeenth century, England, and then Britain, colonized parts of Ireland, North America, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia, strategically positioning itself at the centre of a plethora of economic and political networks. Military wars, forced population movements and the organization, production and large-scale transfer of goods across the oceans of the world were just some of the key elements that facilitated Britains rise to power as the undisputed hegemon of the modern world-system. To write an insular history of Britain which didnt consider this Empire, including how it shaped domestic politics, is quite inadequate (Hobsbawm 1968/1990: 19). Since the 1980s, a growing body of postcolonial scholarship has focused its attention precisely on how the Empire impacted at home, particularly the multifarious ways in which it shaped middle-class understandings of the other suggesting that racism was more central to the making of the British nation than hitherto believed (Hall 1992; McClintock 1995; Hall 2002; Hall and Rose 2006).