'Reverse racism' or 'failed multiculturalism' are myths to deflect the real source of blame: an ever deeper economic rift
As America's first black presidential couple were being toasted across Europe last week, a study released by Harvard and Tufts universities suggested that, rather than embracing a "postracial" era, growing numbers of white Americans see themselves as victims of discrimination. Progress towards racial equality is, they believe, "linked to a new inequality – at their expense" – a notion that the Tea Party movement has developed into a political platform.
These findings resonate with a 2008 British government survey that suggested 29% of white Britons felt themselves to be discriminated against on grounds of race. Although Britain has no race-based quotas for education or employment, perceptions that ethnic minorities get "preferential treatment" at the expense of whites have gained traction. The statistics still show there are proportionately twice as many low-income ethnic minority households as white ones; and unemployment is much higher for black, Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities.
Myths of white marginalisation tend to be dismissed as rightwing bigotry, but the danger is that they can exert a wider appeal and stoke conflict, particularly in troubled economic times. Deployed by the BNP in impoverished Oldham in 2001, they fomented white rage and violence. On the 10th anniversary of the riots last week, a BBC Newsnight film showed that some white Oldham residents still believe that ethnic minorities get better schools and housing.
The nonsensical idea that "racism cuts both ways" is peddled by the English Defence League, which has escalated violent campaigns of intimidation in the name of "indigenous" Britons. While the BNP has met electoral disaster and the EDL remains a street-fighting fringe, we must stay alert to the uses of "reverse racism" – which, along with increasingly acceptable anti-immigrant discourse, provides false explanations for worsening economic conditions.
Most white Britons are not unthinking racists, so we must ask what accounts for the tendency to believe that migrants and ethnic minorities, rather than a blatantly exploitative economic order, are to blame for increasing unemployment and falling wages.
The answer lies less with the far right than the self-serving rhetoric of the political mainstream, which would have us believe that individual or cultural attitudes rather than systemic failures explain economic woes. We are exhorted to self-improvement through bland panaceas like "raising aspiration" and "greater community cohesion". It's easier for politicians to invoke an "aspiration gap" than to acknowledge an opportunity deficit. Or to insist that an ill-resourced social background doesn't matter if you work hard.
That tired "social mobility" mantra emphasises piecemeal individual advancement over more fundamental steps towards fairness. This week it was reported that a token handful of the brightest youth with parental income under £26,000 will be given "highly selective" admission to a new east London college to enable them to go to top universities, while primary schools face cuts. Even this minimal proposal elicited the victimised headline: "Middle class excluded from elite school."
Race and class are pitted against each other when David Cameron denounces "separate lives" and "failed multiculturalism", now an influential cliche. Handily obscured in the process is an economic system that inflicts deprivation across ethnic communities. As the poor blame the poor, the culpable elite are shielded from legitimate anger.
The truly worrying "reverse" action of our times is that which shifts responsibility for improving living conditions from government to citizens, a central plank of Cameron's "big society", endorsed this week by David Miliband. Even as the wealthy tighten their fiscal grip, the onus of "making change happen" is shunted on to the shoulders of the disempowered.
It may be inspiring for a group of inner-city girls to be told by Michelle Obama that they need only believe in themselves and work hard to make it to Oxbridge, but this flies in the face of institutional realities stacked against the economically disadvantaged – particularly black, Pakistani and Bangladeshi Britons, who are under-represented in top universities. Only 50 professors out of 14,000 across the UK are black Britons. These statistics point not only to institutional racism but also to the failures of an educational system skewed in favour of the economically advantaged, and which – through tripled university fees and creeping privatisation – has moved further in that direction.
Without redressing an economic system that enriches a minority by disadvantaging many, promoting social mobility through "aspiration" foments division, not cohesion. When some communities are accused of failing to integrate or receiving preferential treatment, the economic order of our times – with its obscene income differential between the top earners and the rest – is let off the hook. Britain is sleepwalking not into a failed multiculturalism, but to a profound and damaging economic segregation.