The immigrant as the ‘real racist’
If there are cases of race trumping culture when necessary, culture can trump race in the most unexpected ways. This is evident in arguments common in the 1980s (and now revived in a different form) that the real racists are not indigenous whites, but the black and Asian immigrants who insist on keeping alive a wide range of their own ways of life while still wanting to claim full rights as British citizens and turning whites into ‘second-class citizens’.
In other words, immigrants (and the reference here is primarily to non-whites) who refuse to assimilate into the host British culture, including wanting to marry within their own ethnic minority communities, are regarded as racist towards Britons and British national culture.
Also, this assertion is made at the same time as the arguments, exemplified by those of Powell, Manning and others, that being born in this country only entitles the immigrant to legal status as citizens, not entry into Englishness or Britishness. Thus the hapless black and Asian immigrants are placed in a ‘Catch 22’ situation, condemned for not assimilating but simultaneously said to be not capable of assimilation by being of different ‘stock’.
These arguments have not been restricted to Britain. A complex and flexible ‘new racism’ has been a prominent feature of debates in France and other European nation-states. In France similar ideas were propagated in the 1980s by the conservative GRECE (Groupement de Recherche et d’Etudes pour la Civilisation Europeenne) and the neo-liberal Le Club de l’Horlogie, a group of businessmen, civil servants and intellectuals. In response, French sociologists have distinguished between an old racism of inegalitarianism that treated non-whites as inferior, and a post-colonialist racism of (cultural) differentialism which supports policies of excluding non-white minorities on the grounds that their cultures are incompatible with the French national culture or way of life.
However, it is necessary again to see that these forms of proposed exclusion contain various biological elements. France was unique amongst the countries of Western Europe in the 1980s and early 1990s in having a ‘new racism’ that was much more closely allied to an extreme-right, neo-fascist movement (the National Front led by Jean Marie Le Pen), a situation more common in Europe now, as we shall see. But there is an essential continuity between Le Pen’s cultural defence of French national identity and the assumptions underlying the views of Powell.
Le Pen, like Powell and others in Britain, has always buttressed his nationalism with biological notions of the ‘naturalness’ of preferring one’s own kind, thus treating the nation as a biological as well as cultural entity. As Le Pen put it in a famous proclamation, ‘I prefer my daughters to my nieces and my nieces to my neighbours, like everyone else . . . all men are the same’.
This makes a complex combination of biological and cultural features seem just simple ‘common sense’, a form of association also very prevalent in the debates in the UK. Opposition to the argument is made to seem ridiculous and contrary to what ‘everyone knows to be obviously true’. An argument and policies based on ‘common sense’ can thus have consequences which have fairly obvious racial elements and can be legitimately regarded as racist in some form, serving to exclude ‘Arabs’, Africans and Asians as inevitably and forever outside the nation.