Philosophia Africana, Vol. 6, No.

1, March 2003

Race is Ordinary: Britain's Post-Colonial Melancholia

Paul Gilroy
Chair, Department of African American Studies Yale University New Haven, CT

Britain's nationalism and racism continue to be articulated together. Their differences in tone as well as political and emotional value are routinely mediated by the undiminished power of that pivotal third term, "culture," which, even though it is hotly contested, retains all the heavy and distinctive local burdens of England's pecuharities regarding "race." The old "new racism" was a characteristic product of a phase of mass migration. Its culturalist tones are still audible in the anthropological subtleties, disavowals, and evasions of the raciological discourse to which it gives voice. This genteel, common-sense racism finds it difficult to be overt. The more combative expressions of racial antipathy associated with imperial and colonial domination are often regarded as unsavory, disreputable, and offensive. However, nationalism and patriotism, on the other hand, are seldom judged so harshly. At least when viewed from above, these forms of solidarity are welcomed as desirable features of social and political life. They endow national communities with a necessary strength and confidence. Clustered reverently around the flagpole, the mean-spirited people who sounded like nativists, racists, ultra-nationalists, and neo-fascists turn out instead to be plain old patriots. Defending the simple racial hierarchies invented during the nineteenth century is no longer the principal concern of these "patriots." Instead, a more timely emphasis falls on wider dimensions of cultural difference. These divisions are just as intractable and fundamental as the natural hierarchies they partly replace. But they gain extra moral credibility and additional political authority by being brought closer to nationalism and made more remote from any kind of bio-political logic. Hybrid cultures are weakened by their compound character. Diversity has its charms, but mistaken attempts to mix or even dwell peaceably together can bring only destruction. Exposure to otherness always promotes ontological jeopardy. Britain snatched a wider cultural and psychological defeat from the jaws of its victory over Hitlerism in 1945. Since then, the life of the nation has been dominat31

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ed by the inability to face, never mind mourn, the profound change in its circumstances and moods that followed the end of the Empire and consequent loss of imperial prestige. That chronic inability has been intertwined with successive political and economic crises, with the gradual political break up of the United Kingdom, with the arrival of substantial numbers of post-colonial citizen migrants, and with the shock and anxiety that followed from a loss of any sense that the collective is bound by a coherent and distinctive national culture. It encompasses the shifting investments that Britons have made in the monarchy as the institutional complex that produces their head of state, and helps to explain the strange authoritarian pattern of the country's political culture in the period since 1979, when Margaret Thatcher's populist Conservative Party took the helm of the ship of state. This extraordinary failure, which has obstructed the arterial system of Britain's political body, is what I have begun to call post-colonial melancholia. It is a complex pathology with multiple symptoms. The obvious blockages around the themes of immigration, war, and national identity are among the most significant of them. But further effects can be detected in the country's political and emotional responses to its residual colonial responsibilities in Zimbabwe and elsewhere, as well to its fears of becoming itself a colonial dependency of the U.S. These colonial themes contest the coveted position of victim and are connected to projections of Britain as the primary victim, rather than the principal beneficiary, of its colonial dominance. This strand of discourse is common to the actions of all the populist politicians who have addressed the problematic presence of postcolonial settlers, who have described their appearance as an invasion, and who have professed an inability to recognize the country once the arrival of these aliens has decisively altered its moral and cultural topography. More seriously, the country's bewildering patterns of racist violence and inconsistent political responses to the suffering it has created make more sense once the idea of post-colonial melancholia is introduced. I want to emphasize that these problems precede and underpin the poetics of racial difference that make them comprehensible. The country's persistent failure to be hospitable is about far more than just managing the effects of mass immigration. It bears repetition that this is not a matter of "race," though for many people it is understood and lived as such. The consolidation of post-colonial melancholia suggests the disturbing possibility that many Britons have come to need "race," and even rely upon its certainties as one sure way to keep their bearings in an increasingly confusing world. There can be no working through. Britain's inability to mourn its loss of Empire has unfolded in a slow and strikingly non-linear process. Its history reveals a fragmented polity that has not been able to meet the elemental challenge represented by the underlying difficulties of social and political transition with which the presence of post-colonial and other sanctuary-seeking people have been unwittingly bound up. As one might anticipate, post-colonial melancholia characteristically intercuts the racist violence offered as a means to "purify" the nation with the shame-faced tides of self-scrutiny and self-loathing that follow it among decent folk who had outbursts of manic euphoria. This combination of responses can be briefly illus-

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trated by the conclusions of "William Macpherson's report regarding the epochmaking racist murder of Stephen Lawrence, which marked the latest episode in the emergence of the country's racial conscience.' Judge Macpherson acknowledged that prejudice was indeed present in Britain's system of criminal justice, but then emphasized that this dysfunctional racism was "unwitting." To be sure, he identified institutional racism with collective organizational failures, but provided a definition of what counted as racist that was so narrowly and tightly drawn that it excluded almost everybody and left the sources of these mysterious failures inaccessible to all but the management consultants. Responses to his benchmark report also repeated melancholia's distinctive combination of manic elation with misery and ambivalence. Hostility to the idea that racist violence and institutional indifference could be features of British life was intermingled with surprise at the nastiness of racism and the anger and resentment that it causes. The nation's intermittent racial tragedies thus became part of an eventful history. They punctuate the boredom of chronic national decline with a functional anguish that combines the psychological dynamics of denial and displacement. The loss of empire and the additional loss of certainty about the limits of racial identity have begun, as a result, ironically, to sustain people, providing them with both pleasure and distraction. The historical approach tentatively pioneered here seeks less a regular narrative rhythm than oscillation between identification with the victims of racism and tormented self-disgust at the prospect of being implicated either in the problems they import or in their colonial and post-colonial sufferings. This strange blend is nowhere more visible than in the culture surrounding sports in general and football in particular, where nationahsm and racism have repeatedly emerged intertwined and inseparable. For the last three decades or so, the brash motto of true brit nationalism has been supplied by a curious boast: "two world wars and one world cup, doo dah, doo dah." As it echoed around many sports venus, this odd phrase became an ugly, though almost musical, chant. Understanding England's post-colonial melancholia means making sense of the strange symbolic system in which it circulates and the warped patriotisms to which it gives such disturbing expression. The visceral ideas and feelings that it conjures have acquired a continuing appeal, but they have slipped past most academic analyses of popular nationahst politics. Eor the most part, the full, historic force of this fraternalistic and class-bound braggadocio has not been registered in the beleaguered places where analyses of "race" are conducted. Scholastic theorizing is culpable here for its failures of imagination and principle, as well as for its persistent, symptomatic refusal to address the interconnections of nationalism and racism in popular culture. The intellectual commitment to taking the sentiments announced in that phrase seriously, making them worth understanding and unpacking, involves recognizing the dignity and value of the worthy lives that motto has helped to lead astray or divert into the arid lands of nationalist fantasy. Eor anyone willing to dig a little past the bright, clean surface of its red, white, and blue crust, that phrase will supply a wealth of valuable insights into the morbid culture of a once-imperi-

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al nation that has not been able to accept its inevitable loss of prestige in a determinedly post-colonial world. These words provide a rare window from which all the remorseful processes of Britain's vanished imperial status can be observed. In this light, the phrase "Two World Wars and One World Cup" becomes a valuable means through which to consider the bewildering effects of England's post-colonial melancholia even where they have been intermittently offset by the compensations of the country's rare, but nonetheless significant, sporting successes. The words furnish the truly committed investigator with a compressed, but still priceless, history of post-war class relations in what is harder these days to call the United Kingdom. All the latent violence, all the embittered machismo, all the introjected class warfare articulated by defeated victors (mostly men and boys who were baffled and bewildered by a new post-war world that refused to recognize their historic manly qualities) is coded here in a dynamic and still explosive form. Those words and sounds, "two world wars and one world cup, doo dah, doo dah," suggest first, and most disturbingly, that war is a sport. Secondly, they introduce the possibility that sport, particularly football, has the same value as war in the indices of a distinctive national axiology. This twist is a "post-colonial" peculiarity of English life and demands detailed historical consideration. It is not only that the two fields, war and sport, are adjacent in the metonymic chain of Britain's reluctantly post-imperial nationalisms. We are being told that they should be understood as intimately connected areas of the country's national consciousness. Once they have been rendered equivalent and perhaps even interchangeable, we can see that wars and sports generate many of the same emotions and libidinal investments, that they articulate the same intense and highly-prized forms of fraternal solidarity. The surrogate wars that were previously enacted only on the playing field become a better, more exciting game when they are extended after the sporting formalities have been dispensed with. Opposing fans, foreign police, and any "aliens" unlucky enough to get in the way have all contributed to the body count of these excursions. Thirdly, this absurd phrase contains a deeply and spontaneously-conservative assertion of national continuity. It expresses not national history but an anti-history governed by the familiar amnesiac principles by which deluded imperial nations hve. The boast these words articulate is also an integral part of a bigger denial. It announces that nothing significant changed during the course of Britain's downwardly mobile twentieth century. Under a tattered flag, the precious thin red, white, and blue line remains unbreached, just like the crumbhng, chalky frontier down at Dover. We are then required to admit that the nations that triumphed in 1918 and 1945 live on, unmodified and for the most part, unremarked upon. An implicit challenge invites us to discover their untimely, contentious definitions of nationality today as a lingering, gritty presence inside the glittery but battered package of Britain's perennially suspended modernization. Eourthly, those words testify to the continuing power of a class-based pohtical language. In a stroke, they repudiate the fashionable notion that casual and informal status hierarchies have now replaced the destructive architecture of an obviously class-divided nation with a more appealing new arrangement in which class and regional divisions are more evenly

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blended, or perhaps altogether dispersed. Post-industrial Britain's class divisions adhere stubbornly to the regional and geo-political patterns of its ebbing industrial phase. They are clearly alive and well. While inequality is intensified and recreated, sport and its various spectator cultures are producing, reproducing, and channeling nationalist and absolutist identifications and identities in acute but attractive forms. Those historic chanted words have another disturbing dimension: their perlocutionary power. This atavistic force is little understood. It produces the artificially whitened, comprehensively armored national community to which the phrase casually refers. It demonstrates that there are still many courageous and willing working-class hearts beating around here. The martial I am tempted to say Churchillian performances in which they are incanted communicate another significant hint. They reveal that there is a sense in which those brave but confused souls prefer an ordered past, in which they were exploited and poor but knew who they were, to a chronically chaotic present in which even those limited certainties have been stripped away by the new corporate mandate of interminable, regressive change. In Britain's mud and blood spattered past, heroic lions were led to ignominious slaughter by posh donkeys. Today at last, their belated but incomplete redemption is finally at hand. It is to be accomplished not so much by any occasional national victories on the sports field but by another characteristic national accomplishment: unblinking and unthinking pride in those performances indifferent to whether the worthy lions in question are ultimately victorious. England's traditional foolhardiness and "up and at 'em" daring combine with a monstrously exaggerated sense of the country's importance to ensure that it will triumph in the national pride stakes every time. That triumphant conquest entails a more profound and total victory than any mere sporting contest could produce. The same sinister phrase reveals its more melancholy aspects once the adrenaline begins to subside. It is deployed, but inevitably fails, to block consciousness of the irreversible fact that the carnival of Britain's imperial potency is now over forever. Any residual celebrations to which those words contribute help to constitute not the final stages of that stirring jubilee but the protracted process of cleaning-up that has followed. They supply an appropriate vernacular soundtrack to the overdue task of taking down the bunting. The historical record of England's bellicose fans "on tour" is dismal and well known. But there is still a great deal of reluctance to identify these recurrent and depressing symptoms to the country's wider topography of ultra-nationalist raceconsciousness. We need to understand that this refusal compounds the injuries involved in exclusion. Those of us who have had to run for our lives from vicious drunken crowds intent on a different, bloodier sport than the one they paid to see from the terraces, have always been able to know where nationalist sentiments were wired into the raciological circuitry of the British nation and where brit racisms and nationalisms were fused together as something like a single hyper-ethnic gestalt. This ready intermingling is not only an issue for English fans whose fears and conceits have a wider resonance in the nationalist aspirations of the United Kingdom's minor nations. Even when defined explicitly against Imperial England, their dreams

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of nationality have been enhanced by the ideal of purity and fantasies of homogeneity. The appearance of Noel Gallagher's Union-Jack-emblazoned, but Koreanmade, Epiphone guitar may have been calculated to cement the notion that the swinging sixties were back, but Oasis was not The Who or The Beatles and England has found it hard to qualify for the World Cup, never mind win it. Though it is an invaluable pointer to those sensitive spots where the body of Britain's postcolonial polity was poorly sutured, the terrace chant of "two world wars and one world cup" now sounds increasingly bizarre, especially when intercut with the immortal theme tunes from World War II movies such as The Dambusters and The Great Escape. Beating Germany 5-1 is all very well, but the memory of World War II has been stretched so thin that it cannot possibly accomplish all the important cultural work it is increasingly relied upon to do. A generation for whom knowledge of that conflict arrives on a long loop via Hollywood is nonetheless required to use a cheaply manufactured surrogate memory of it as the favored means to find and restore their ebbing sense of what it is to be English. Devolution and disintegration have intensified a nagging uncertainty as to the cultural content of national identity. Is it morris dancing or line dancing? Gosford Park, Finsbury Park, or park and ride? The failure to know, or rather to feel, what that favored cultural filling should be feeds the melancholic outlook, which is further compounded by the shrinkage of the national community and the disturbing news that the newly-devolved partner nations in Scotland and Wales are evidently having a better time. Their student grants have been restored and their senior citizens will enjoy residential care without the indignities of means testing. This dimension of melancholic post-colonial anxiety over identity shows that the idea of England can no longer be employed as a synonym for Britain and must contract to fit the diminished ideological space between a political devolution based on alternative ethnicity and economic regionahzation. Englishness is called upon to manage the stressful consequences of the great and growing split between city and country. This is now rather more complicated than a simple polar division between green-wellied middle England and the hip denizens of the grimy metropolis, which, for all its diversity, is in film and fiction likely to be purged of anyone who isn't white in what we can call the Notting Hill effect.^ In contrast, the breathless, elated multi-culturalism of shows such as Changing Rooms and Ground Force (unremarked upon by their critics in government) formalizes the delicate cultural operations involved in holding the elements of a new England together. This is accomplished by manipulating its innermost private spaces and, in the process, showing that taste and life style preferences are much more important elements of identity than ethnicity, class, or regional ties could ever be. The insecure and perennially anxious nation revealed by these cultural discrepancies is inured in a variety of disappointment for which the dreadful denouements at the end of Changing Rooms provide an excellent training. It is baffled by the demand to adjust itself to the challenging presence of racially different people, and, in turn, magically encapsulates the other conflicts evident in this transitional

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moment. Intrusions by immigrants, incompatible Blacks, and fascinating/threatening strangers have come to symbolize all the difficulties involved in the country's grudging modernization. Outside the goldfish bowl of the Big Brother House, the conflicts that result soon call the desirability of that unchosen destination into question. Britain's Black and other minority settlers continue to appear as a problem, but its dimensions are transformed. "Race" is rendered differently as a result of major changes that have occurred both inside and outside of the country. The meaning and representation of race politics have been greatly altered and its strategic importance relative to other aspects of government has been changed. This situation reflects the fact that, against the logic of race thinking, Britain's various Black communities are not static. They are being actively re-composed by the pressure of local circumstances, by the new arrivals whose experience of racism leads them to seek political allies, and by inter-generational adaptation as well as novel and unstable geo-political conditions. The forms of solidarity these communities produce in answer to the racisms that still circumscribe them are not like the defensive formations built by the post-1945 wave of citizen migrants. Demographic and cultural changes have meant that the New World histories that turned the counter-memory of racial slavery into an interpretative device and that could be apphed to any example of injustice and exploitation have lost much of their inspirational force. The combative mood of the 1970s was buoyed by the Caribbean and American political traditions that politicized Blackness all over the world. The militant spirit was received in unexpected places. Transmitted indirectly into the ludic youth cultures of the un- and under-employed, it altered the bandwidth of class struggles outside the workplace, as well as inside it, with subversive demands for a dignified life without harassment. It is no longer possible to ignore that insights derived from those traditions do not always connect with the experiences and understanding of younger people or with the vision of African and Asian settlers whose colonial and post-colonial sufferings have been necessarily different. The Rastafari have gone and the Rude Boys are back in force. Some of them are now girls and some of them are white. The delicate and special dynamics of what used to be called "afro-asian unity" no longer color strategy or analyses in the same manner. The old racist myths of Asian passivity, homogeneity, and cerebral malevolence have been laid to welcome rest. The burial of that orientalist baggage has taken place amidst a comprehensive exploration of the identities, histories, and memories that might define the boundaries of newly emergent ethno-political communities understandably ambivalent about locating themselves inside the discourse of raciality if they have a chance to escape it. The racial idea of "Asian" has, for example, been broken down and enumerated into a multiplicity of regional, religious, and other cultural fractions. It is true that manythough by no means allvoices raised from within these diverse groups do not recognize themselves in the powerfully empty and possibly anachronistic master-signifier "Black." However, the change that I want to describe goes beyond that particular contingency. The symbolic and linguistic system in which political Blackness made sense

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was a phenomenon of assertive decolonization now in retreat. Its defeat is also connected to wider cultural shifts like the rise of identity politics, corporate multi-culture, and an imploded, narcissistic obsession with the minutiae of ethnicity. The historic turn away from the simpler efficacy of Blacknessa bridging term that had promoted vernacular cosmopolitan conversation and synchronized action among the victimizedcannot be separated from the pursuit of more complex and highly differentiated ways of fixing and instrumentalizing culture and difference. These developments have made anti-racism less politically focused and more difficult to organize, if not impossible. They are not only more likely to be in tune with an understanding of "race" that derives from diversified market relations, but have also helped to re-specify ethnicity exclusively in the contentious cultural terms of life-style and consumer preference. The end of armed anti-colonial resistance, particularly in Africa, challenged anti-racist movements in the overdeveloped countries to find new sources of motivation, to invent a new political analysis and a morally informed vision of equality that did not derive its ethical credentials from the defeat of the Third Reich and the overcoming of Apartheid. It is easier now to define these historical dynamics in relation to the globalization of Black politics, and to see how, with the demise of those low-intensity wars, the pan-Africanism of solidarity and the pan-Africanism of return have both been stalled. We must now address the possibility that the political and economic interests of Black and other minority people inside the citadels of overdevelopment may diverge from the agenda being defined by those outside the gates, who dwell with scarcity. The diasporic movement of the 1970s was formed in the coordinates of an EastASC^est geometry of power. The inability to move it beyond nineteenth-century nation-building paradigms focused by territorial sovereignty towards new modes of networked connection and synchronized action expresses something urgent and important that is not hmited to the global politics of "race." In an arrangement that seems to typify the combination of perplexity and inertia shared by many similar inter- and trans-national formations, the fading energies of this arrested movement have been diverted. They are now deployed to inspire post-modern simulations of the political and cultural connections that had defined anti-imperialist political projects in the early years of the twentieth century.^ It has been disastrous that the vocal Western-hemisphere movement of slave descendants has not, for the most part, been able to admit contemporary Africa's ecological, medical, and military emergencies into its conceptions of the present. Things were different when Ethiopianism and Garveyism, rather than Afrocentrism and occultism, set the tone. Then, to contain modernity, to appreciate its colonial constitution, and to criticize its reliance on racialized governmental codes all required finding an autonomous space outside of it. The desire to exist elsewhere was a governing impulse. There is no longer, however, any uncontaminated, pastoral, or romantic location to which opposition and dissent might fly, and so, a new culture of consolation has been fashioned in which being against this tainted modernity has come to mean being before it.

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Comparable investments in the restorative power of the pseudo-archaic occur elsewhere. They help to transform Harry Potter's anachronistic suburban world into a magical place, and are routine features of much "new age" thinking. They govern the quest for a repudiation of modernity that is shared by the various versions of Islam that have largely eclipsed Ethiopianism as the principal spiritual resource and wellspring of critique among young Black Europeans. Their desire to find an exit from consumerism's triumphant phantasmagoria reveals them to be bereft, adrift without the guidance they would have absorbed from the national liberation movements of the cold war period and the struggles for both civil and human rights with which they were connected. Instead, an Americacentered, consumer-oriented culture of Blackness has become prominent in this post-colonial setting. It conditions the dreams of many young Britons, irrespective of their ancestral origins or physical appearance. This brash and celebratory imperial formation is embarrassed by the geo-political fault-line that re-divides the world, opposing the overdeveloped north to the suffering south. That barrier provides the defining element in a new topography of global power, which is making new demands upon the overwhelmingly national character of civil society and ideal of national citizenship. Creative and negative thinking is needed to generate more complex and challenging narratives that can be faithful to the everyday patterns of heterocultural metropolitan life by reducing the exaggerated dimensions of racial difference to a liberating ordinary-ness. From this angle, "race" is nothing special, a virtual reality given meaning only by the fact that racism endures. These overdue revisions remain remote. The crude, dualistic architecture of racial discourse stubbornly militates against their appearance. Given the extent of deepening economic and social divisions, it is perhaps surprising that the convivial metropolitan cultures of the country's young people are still a bulwark against the machinations of racial politics. This enduring quality of resistance among the young is no trivial matter. It is much more than an effect of multi-cultural consumerism and communicates something of the irrevocably changed conditions in which factors of identity and solidarity that derive from class, gender, sexuality, and region have made a strong sense of racial difference unthinkable to the point of absurdity. The fact that so many British youth have been delivered to a place, as Nitin Sawhney memorably puts it, "beyond skin" communicates how much those critical formations have changed. Electronic dance music, almost always without words, has been a dominant form during most of these years. Its technological base and its metropolitan conditions of existence have promoted a spontaneous and ordinary hybridity that has been alloyed with recreational drug use on an extraordinary scale. Racism is still enacted but is largely devoid of any strong belief in integral races. The resulting "sub-cultures" have lost nearly all of their old political flavors. They have been partially annexed by corporate power and exported around the globe without anyone associated with either politics or government being able to appreciate their worth as political and economic assets. We now have a reasonable sense of the technological and cultural develop-

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ments that have transformed Britain into a post-modern society resting unsteadily upon the ugly twin pillars of celebrity and charity. Apart from agonizing about the fundamental importance of the nation's currency to its fragile collective identity, the idea of Britain's national interest has been systematically disassociated from everyday life. It is confined instead to the domain of global geo-politics, in which the country's dwindling fund of prestige can be seen to be immediately at stake. Schools, hospitals, and transportion are seldom seen as national assets, sources of collective pride, or expressions of popular and democratic sovereignty. They are only appendages of the market that drain the national purse and confirm the nation's reduced circumstances now that the family silver has been flogged off. The systematic privatization of these important public institutions has led to their eventual withdrawal from the scope of national consciousness. This has altered the character and urgency of nationalist discourse. We can hardly be surprised when nationahsm assumes xenophobic, belligerent, and mihtaristic forms, for example, around the spectator sports that have provided such dubious assistance to the idea of cultural integration. It is not, as many commentators suggest, that the presence of immigrants corrodes the homogeneity and solidarity that are necessary to the cohesion and mutuality of authentically social-democratic regimes, but rather that, in their flight from socialist principles and welfare state inclusivity, these beleaguered regimes have produced strangers and aliens as the limit against which increasingly evasive national particularity can be seen, measured, and then, if need be, negatively discharged. It should be emphasized that the raw material for this perilous exercise is not supplied by aging representatives of the incoming generation. Rather, it is supplied by the two succeeding generations of their locally born descendants who are trapped in the vulnerable role of perpetual outsider but nevertheless have a sense of entitlement that makes them reluctant to seek common cause with refugees and asylum seekers. I want to turn now to the presence of British citizens among the hooded and chained al-Qaida prisoners in Caribbean detention, which has been baffling to most commentators on the September 11 attacks and their aftermath. Civilizationism and culturalist racism alike dictate that these evil people have reverted to cultural type. The iron logic of ethnic absolutism comprehends their affiliation to fundamentalism not as choice or will but as an instinctive response to the combined weight of history, tradition, and bio-cultural continuity. Politically, their perverse tenure of British citizenship becomes a retroactive indictment of overly lax immigration control and nationality legislation in the past. They are among us, but they are not of us. At worst, their presence is likely to have been the illegitimate result of the arranged marriages that define their otherness. At best, their treacherous choices will remain a private and spiritual matter disconnected from the patterns of everyday life inside Britain. Their sham fundamentalism is no more or less alien than was their misguided introduction into this country in the first place. They are only traitors because immigrants are doomed in perpetuity to be outsiders. Wherever they have been born, their children and grandchildren will never belong.

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This hollow common sense makes young Europeans' enthusiasm for political Islam nothing whatever to do with domestic relations or domestic racism, or with policing, schooling, prison, and the labor market. Last summer's rioting in Britain's northern industrial towns was ventriloquized to communicate the same duplicitous and facile order of readily racialized truths. Then, the rioters rioted because they were alien. The proof of that alien-ness was the fact that they rioted. New thinking is needed that can take this discussion beyond the residual categories of the outmoded 1960s debate on "race." Politicians are not even prepared to acknowledge that two generations have passed since anybody in government sat down and tried to make sense of the politics of race in Britain. They identify a response to profound and militant disenchantment among these young British people in the litany of ever more elaborate citizenship pledges and obligatory language training. Those measures will do nothing to address the conditions that have produced routine disaffection and exceptional treachery. The idea that a significant number of the men likely to be indicted as members of Bin Laden's international terrorist conspiracy have enjoyed intimate post-colonial connections with Black London life needs to be considered carefully. The story of Black European involvement in these geopolitical currents can be connected to the history of immigration and race politics in deeper and more disturbing ways. Zacarias Moussaoui, "the twentieth hijacker," is routinely described as a Erench citizen of Moroccan ancestry, but he lived in London for nine years and completed his education at South Bank University in the vernacular cosmopolitan space of the Elephant and Castle. The network that connects him to Richard Reid, the hapless, gigantic "Shoebomber," encompasses Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam as well as London. We know that, like Reid, he worshiped at the Brixton mosque that seems to have been a key point connecting the routine frustrations and hatreds of people made angry and miserable by white supremacy to the balm of a fundamentalist Utopia. Twenty years before, a lost and damaged young man like Richard Reid might have found comfort and sustenance in a different political, philosophical, and cultural system. At that point, globalizing Ethiopianism and Rastafari livity still plausibly combined indictments of imperialism with the restorative rhetoric of Black power. The ascetic Rastafari spoke the language of peace and love and the language of rights and justice, though not in a liberal accent. At the end of the Cold War, they held provocatively to the fundamental unity of humankindsomething that could only be recovered and made useful if the destructive power of racism could be acknowledged and repaired. There would be wars until the color of skin was of no more significance than the color of eyes. But once southern Africa was liberated, it was clear that the Rastafari would not be waging it. The later eighties and nineties saw the poetic eschatology of the Caribbean basin succeeded by a much more self-consciously militant and militaristic approach to Black solidarity. This time it was the obvious product of the overdeveloped world. A hip-hop mentality derived from American apartheid and addressed to those distinctive conditions of inequality and exclusion replaced humility with excess: Martin was Uncle Tom and Malcolm was manhood. Under the corporate tutelage of Spike Lee and company, consumerism, hedonism, and gun-play were no

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longer to be incompatible with the long-term goal of racial uplift. Eor many, the mainstreaming of Black culture was a shift that tainted and compromised the very core of Black resistance. Erom then on, America's Afro-Baptist pieties were an inducement to surrender, rather than revolution. It was Islam, rather than Christianity, that would supply the patch of solid ground on which post-modern Black nationalism could plant its expensively-shod ideological feet. Willing to break the hold of American-centered thought, but unable to turn entirely from its racial phantasmagoria, the austere and authoritarian versions of Black nationalism peddled in Black London's underground turned in the direction of America's own versions of pseudo-fundamentalist Islam. Eantasies of national rebirth were lubricated by the opportunistic wisdom of figures such as Black America's self-styled "truth terrorist" Khalid Muhammad. A highly selective appropriation of Islamic motifs assisted in developing ascetic and communitarian responses to nihilism, violence, and consumerism. This Islam was leavened with diverse occult and new age themes. In the best protestant fashion, it soon turned inwards and helped the desire to re-make the world take second place behind the obligation to re-make oneself. Power was exercised in ever more narrow circuits: over one's own body at the gym and, above all, in the regulation of interpersonal conduct between men and women, between parents and children. America was initially thrilled and horrified to be told that John Walker Lindh it's very own wigger Talib was a suburban hip hopper from an affluent Californian family who was turned into a Muslim fanatic through over-exposure to the prison conversion autobiography of Malcolm X. The idea of contamination by Blackness is an old script. It qualifies his image as a traitor with layers of psychological confusion. With his primal identity on the line. Walker started to become intelligible once we discovered that his father, Erank Lindh, had abandoned his mother for another man. Walker's acts became comprehensible within the rules of a corrupted family romance. Though Richard Reid's estranged parents have also been prominent in a national quest for an explanation of his conduct, his less pampered life tells an altogether different sort of tale as deeply English as Walker's is American. More than the antics of those maimed Mullahs now active in the shadows of the Arsenal and elsewhere, Richard Reid has been used to manifest the uncomfortable truth that British multiculturalism has failed. His place in history has already been assured, not by his ideological commitments or his almost comical ineptitude, but by the bizarre instruments of his failed martyrdom: the sophisticated training-shoe bombs that enclosed his gigantic clown-sized feet. Those iconic feet matter of course. In the context of all the simplistic rubbish that has been spouted about his racially mixed parentage, they have been made to bear the all the weight of nineteenth-century theories of hybrid vigor. Like his enormous body, those feet not only confirm Reid's essential monstrosity, but also represent him as the cuckoo in our national nest, nourished by misplaced goodwill only to repay that kindness with violence and indifference. His trainers make an announcement to a world more used to savoring the cool achievements of celebri-

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ty "half-castes" such as Sade, Scary Spice, and Ryan Giggs. They say that rather than being a routine and essentially banal feature of contemporary British life, race mixing is another misguided social experiment that can only end in catastrophic violence. Eor more than thirty years, the core logic of British racial thinking specified that the social and political problems embodied in the invasive presence of immigrants and their kin are an intrusion, an alien wedge cutting into the body of an unsuspecting nation. This is why Britain's Black settlers were always immigrants and why recent talk of refugees and asylum seekers remains saturated with traces of racial discourse regardless of the wholesome intention to place these discussions on a post-powellite footing. Today the traditional desire to push immigration outside dovetails neatly with the new mood that fixes the interpretation of September 11 horrors and their ongoing aftermath as a clash of civilizations and their mutually incompatible cultural systems. Whatever the demographics of pension provision and negative population growth may communicate, there is a powerful warning here for would-be architects of the country's "coffee colored" future: a cat born in a kipper box will nonetheless remain a cat. The vivid tabloid accounts of the Reid family's fortunes over several generations support this default view of the relationship between "race" culture and social pathology. Erom that angle, the seeds of Richard's recent tragedy were sown long ago by Hubert Reid, his migrating Jamaican grandfather. It is with the figures of his estranged father, Robin, a wretched specimen of the tragic mulatto type, seemingly plucked from the Victorian depths of Enoch Powell's worst nightmare, and his mother Lesley Hughes, a white Englishwoman who attracts sympathy by having made a mistake twenty-eight years ago, that things get serious and all the damage done to Britain by post-war immigration becomes apparent. Mrs. Hughes had the presence of mind to divorce her disreputable Black husband and flee to the countryside. Erom her rural home, she looked with palpable horror towards the bad behavior of the long-lost child who, like Victor Erankenstein's hideous and equally unnatural offspring, had chosen a path of destruction as its compensation for exile from kith and kin. Bravely resisting the pressure to make failed family life into the overall explanation of his son's treachery, Robin Reid offered an eloquent counter-analysis of both their blighted lives. The various effects of British racism were cited repeatedly as he tried to create an emotional and psychological context in which his son's perplexing political choices might be suddenly comprehensible. London-born Robin's words were undermined by our knowledge that, like his son, he too has been a criminal. He revealed that he had spent 18 of his 51 years behind bars for numerous minor offenses. Though he has managed to go straight for the last eight years, his bad character was confirmed in the press by the fact that he has been living on government benefits during all of that time. These details tied his personal tragedy to the contemporary social problems represented by his symbolic kin: the criminal asylum seekers who stormed the Channel tunnel to try to reach England's promised land a few nights later.

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Though acknowledging his failure as a father, Robin Reid refused to identify that shortcoming as the key to his son's fate. He claimed credit for introducing the boy to the Islamic faith that he, Uke Malcolm X, had discovered while in prison and used subsequently as an antidote to the racism that bound and broke his hopes. Robin Reid says firmly that he found refuge from that same racism in the fraternity provided to him by the Hells Angels who, like the Islamic brotherhood that took in his errant son, did not care about "race" or color. The historic tension between the claims of communities we choose and those into which we are born has seldom been more starkly stated. Britain's jails are brimful with Richard Reids. The largely unacknowledged effects of institutional racism have polluted the waters of its civic culture. Demonic images of Reid and his peers will doubtless help to erase the limited yet positive contribution made by the Macpherson report. But analysis that fails to take Europe's post-colonial conflicts into account will not be able to explain why young Black Europeans might find fundamentalism attractive or be willing to hitch their hopes for a world without racism to the absurd engine of an Islamic revolution. New Labour's recent attempts to recreate a party-political consensus over "race" and immigration by waging tabloid war on refugees and asylum seekers have helped produce the perilous situation in which we now find ourselves. It is the government that is cynical, not the electorate it insults on those grounds. However much ministers protest to the contrary, it is obvious that they are actively complicit in the strategy of using a tough line on "race" to send nods and winks to the good burgers of middle England, reassuring them that whatever they have heard about Stephen Lawrence and institutional racism, when it comes to turning back the alien tide of refugees and asylum seekers, it's business as usual. Once the consumerist values of neo-hberalism are factored into this picture, we may be misled by the fact that Black Britons can benefit from the love of exotica that arises as a response to the demands of living with difference, of being with the Other. This confusion is compounded when glamorous and unfamiliar cultures can be consumed in the absence of any face-to-face recognition or real-time negotiations with their actual creators. But that desire for what was formerly stigmatized and forbidden can also be interpreted as yet another symptom of the collapse of English cultural confidence that has fed the development of anxious and insecure local and national identities. Today's hatreds and violence arise less than they did in the past, from supposedly reliable anthropological knowledge of the stable identity and predictable difference of the Other. Their novel sources lie in the problem of not being able to locate the Other's difference in the common-sense lexicon of alterity. Different people are still hated and feared, but the timely antipathy against them is nothing compared to the hatreds turned towards the greater menace of the half-different and the partially familiar. To have mixed is to have been party to a great civilizationai betrayal. Any unsettling traces of the resulting hybridity must therefore be excised from the tidy, bleached-out zones of an impossibly pure culture. Aside from its parochial obligations, I hope it has been clear that this line of argument is also intended to be a modest contribution to the making of a new plan-

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etary humanism. The newness of that mentality resides precisely in the ways that it is systematically opened to the difficult work of understanding how "race-thinking" configured and distorted the exclusionary humanisms of the past. The detour through modern histories of suffering is mandatory. It provides an invaluable means to locate ethical and political principles that can guide the work of building more just and equitable social relations. This is not anti-racism of the type that says we must learn to love and value human differences rather than fear and misrecognize them. It is a new project because it is prepared to break with the notion that racial differences are a self-evident, immutable fact of political life. It refuses the idea that that this order of difference is somehow necessary to the very stability of our conflicted world. Instead, it suggests that the reification of race must be challenged if effective work against racism is to be accomplished. It seeks to turn the tables on purity-seekers, whoever they may be, to force them to account for their phobia about otherness and their violent hostility in the face of the clanging, selfevident sameness of suffering humankind. The version of multi-culturalism taking shape at this point is not a lifestyle option. Its dissident value is confirmed everywhere in the chaotic pleasures of the post-colonial urban world. These arguments were also born from a desire to make it as easy for people to imagine a world without racial differences as it is for them currently to imagine the end of the world. The commitment to being recognized as a Black European that it proclaims is hopefully part of a larger transition that may take us beyond racialized and racializable categories of all kinds. If it is currently impossible to acquire or even imagine that variety of "post-ethnic" European identity, then that state of affairs is not only a result of the racism that still blocks the paths towards belonging, but also of the enduring power of racial identities as such. With the examples of the post-colonial metropolis and its hybrid cultures on our side, I suspect that we will do a better job of fighting racism if we are able to weaken their claims upon us. Historical analyses of racial hierarchy that overflow the fading boundaries of nation-states are essential to the credibility of this adventurous project. The abortive discussions begun at the 2001 Durban conference on racism and other forms of inequality (shut down prematurely in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on New York) may yet prove to be the beginning of a truly global opportunity to debate the damage that "race" and racism have done to democracy and hope alike. We do not know where this planetary conversation will take us or even whether the concept of racism will ultimately be an adequate vehicle for the cosmopolitan histories of hierarchy and inequality we will need.

NOTES
1. 2. Cm 4262-1 February 1999. Nick Hornby's "novels" can be introduced here. The passages in High Fidelity where Solomon Burke is awarded the custodianship of authentic human feeling are especially worth citing. (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996.) Robert J. C. Young, Post-colonialism: A History (London: Routledge, 2002).

3.