Elections are a time for the use and abuse of political language. As immigration is a bigger issue in the 2005 election than in any for a generation, one word that is, predictably, flying about is racism.
The r-word has, of course, become devalued through overuse and inaccurate use, a portmanteau term of abuse. But it remains a necessary word, one we cannot do without. This is a brief plea both for a more rigorous use of the word and for a broader vocabulary to capture the spectrum of feelings and opinions that are often indiscriminately and damagingly bracketed as racist.
So what should racism refer to? There are two "strong" forms of racism. One, following the dictionary definition, is based on the belief in the inherent superiority of one race over another—Jews over Arabs or vice versa, for example. A second, sometimes related, racism is based on antipathy to a particular race. A person need not hold that other races are inferior but may simply prefer his or her own race and dislike either all other races or some particular race. It is possible to be a sinophobe but a philosemite, for example, or to dislike Indians but to like black Africans.
With both of these racisms there is usually, but not always, a very high awareness of race, racial purity and the racialisation of difference—sometimes even a belief that, as Disraeli famously wrote, "race is all." In developed liberal democracies based on an idea of equal citizenship, these strong racist views are anathema in mainstream politics. The British National party more or less openly takes the second position—a white separatist position—wanting a white Britain without racial mixing, but its rhetoric also slips over into white supremacism and thus the first form of strong racism. Much of the worst street racism in Britain—the name-calling and attacks—is led by strong racists with some variation of the two beliefs above.
There is also a third form of racism which is much weaker but also more pervasive than the first two, and which is more accurately called racial prejudice—that is the tendency to make an automatic connection between race and certain moral or behavioural traits. Until quite recently, and certainly throughout the time of the British empire, such connections were considered part of common sense. Since the mid-point of the 20th century—roughly since the Holocaust, the end of colonialism, the civil rights movement and significant non-white immigration into developed countries—such views have seldom been expressed openly. But they remain widespread among all classes and races and in all countries. Moreover, they do so because the connection is, in part, true. Jews are more likely to be successful in business than Pakistanis; young Afro-Caribbeans are more likely to succeed in sport or popular culture than young Chinese; some groups do have a stronger work ethic than others. To point these things out is not an expression of racial prejudice; it becomes so only when the explanation of the trait is racial rather than historical. And it is possible to be a perfectly decent person and to have flourishing, equal friendships with people of other races and ethnicities while still expressing racialised assumptions about group behaviour, rather in the same way that people used to express general class prejudice—working-class people are inherently ignorant or upper-class people snobbish.
The response to these different prejudices should obviously be correspondingly different. We need some realism here. While it is possible to eliminate strong racism from acceptable political discourse and marginalise it to an eccentric fringe—as is being done in Britain—pervasive racial prejudice will always be with us to some extent because it is based on a common human tendency to extrapolate from limited experience. We will go on generalising about races and ethnicities just as we will about national traits and social classes—the point here is not to make the best the enemy of the good by placing mild racial prejudice in the same pot as ethnic cleansing.
So what about those things that should not be called racist? It is, of course, damaging to sensible political debate to say that it is racist to support immigration controls. If that were true, then most of the population is racist, including a large section of ethnic minority Britons. It is possible to be anti-racist and against mass immigration (that is probably the majority position in Britain). And similarly, it is not racist to be selective about whom you allow into the country, so long as the criterion for judgement is not directly or indirectly racial. We may, for example, prefer skilled over unskilled workers or IT specialists over other professionals. Nor is it racist to love one's country—even to be rather possessive about it—so long as it is not built on the disparagement of other countries.
Considering how obsessed modern politics has become with race, our language about the feelings it generates is oddly impoverished. There is a big conceptual blank between racism at one end of the spectrum and liberal cosmopolitanism at the other. Yet most people in the world are somewhere in between—they will often have strong affinities to the people they have been raised among and initial unease about, and even hostility to, outsiders, especially if they live in tight-knit communities. Generally speaking this is overcome with experience, as we learn to see outsiders as more like us than we had first assumed. The idea of affinity does not imply a once and for all commitment to only one group or an inability to transcend one's group of origin. But it is important to try to distinguish between commitments which are legitimate expressions of belonging and those which are racist. Here our language lets us down. There are some other terms—xenophobia, nativism, ethnocentrism—which are often more accurate than racism but have come to be more or less synonymous with it. The grey area in which most people live—with their familiarities, loyalties and initial unease about strangers—remains undescribed.
Finally, if we require greater rigour and realism on these matters, we should also allow ourselves more optimism. Some people argue that not only has little progress on race been made but also that the current election debate is taking us back to the more overtly racist Britain of the 1960s and 1970s. Taking the country as a whole there is no evidence for this belief, although there are some pockets of real racial tension. There are, however, widespread anxieties about the rapid changes in British society and immigration is often an emblem for these anxieties. And as the statistician John Salt makes clear in this issue, we are living through a period of historically high immigration into Britain. In a robust democracy it is quite proper that its nature and extent should be debated; indeed, it would be dangerous if the mainstream parties were not debating it vigorously. That debate should, of course, not raise false fears, peddle misinformation or denigrate the immigrant contribution.
We have come a long way in 50 years and many people, especially older people who lived through the last stages of empire, have negotiated a remarkable volte face on race. The language in which these issues are debated in the mainstream media is far more sensitive and respectful than was the case even 25 years ago. And if one takes four indicators of racial integration—rate of interracial marriage, minority representation in positions of authority, a majority willingness to fight overt racism and minority participation in national events—then Britain has moved a considerable way in the right direction in the past decades. A vigorous and balanced election debate about immigration should not reverse this achievement.
