Sharing from another list, blog by my colleague Akwugo Emejulu here at 
Edinburgh University
Julie




http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2733-on-the-hideous-whiteness-of-brexit-let-us-be-honest-about-our-past-and-our-present-if-we-truly-seek-to-dismantle-white-supremacy


   On the Hideous Whiteness Of Brexit: “Let us be honest about our past
   and our present if we truly seek to dismantle white supremacy”

/Akwugo Emejulu
<http://www.ed.ac.uk/education/about-us/people/academic-staff/profile.php?person_id=173>, 

Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, examines how white
supremacy has operated before and after the UK’s EU referendum and
argues that the visibility of racism following the Brexit vote must not
obscure the conditions for its possibility. Her co-authored book, The
Politics of Survival: Minority Women, Activism and Austerity in France
and Britain is forthcoming with Policy Press./* *

Despite vociferous claims to the contrary, Brexit
<http://www.versobooks.com/blogs?tag=221> really is about race—but not
in ways we might expect. In this seemingly ‘post-race’ era, Brexit shows 
us how whiteness, as a power relation, operates in ways to cast itself 
as both a ‘victim’ and an ‘innocent’ simultaneously.

*Whiteness As Victimhood*

An unstated campaign strategy of the Leave campaign was to re-imagine
Britain and Britishness (but really Englishness) as white in order to
make particular kinds of claims to victimhood which would highlight
economic inequality without challenging neoliberalism. For instance, a
key argument of the campaign was that the ‘working class’ (who were
unquestionably assumed to be white) were suffering under the burden of
mass immigration, which transformed the culture of their neighbourhoods
and put undue strain on public services. Thus we see whiteness operating 
as victim—the white working class is being held hostage in their own 
country by migrants. Any critique of this victimhood further re-enforces 
a victim status through fulminations that the critic is ‘the real racist’.

This construction of whiteness as victimhood purposefully makes it
difficult to understand how and why public services are in crisis.
Rather than migration causing the crisis, the crisis is, in fact, the
official policy of the current Conservative government
<http://www.ifs.org.uk/uploads/publications/bns/BN170.pdf>: austerity
measures have been the dominant policy response since the 2008 economic
crisis. Austerity, however, has not been imposed on Britain by the
European Union. Rather, the then Coalition government and the current
Conservative government voluntarily adopted this policy of shrinking and 
privatising the state—with disastrous and uneven effects for particular 
social groups. In other words, those ‘shy’ 2015 Tory voters have much to 
answer for in terms of the destruction that austerity has wrought—but 
this complicity has been erased by the Brexit campaign. Instead, 
migrants have been weaponised to stoke fear and get out the vote for the 
leave campaign.

Although we appear to be in a ‘post-fact’ Britain, I feel compelled to
remind readers that austerity measures are unequally distributed across
the population. Certainly, the poorest local authorities, especially
those in the north and east, are being hit hardest by these
unprecedented cuts to public spending
<https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/cost-cuts-impact-local-government-and-poorer-communities>. 

However, looking more closely at the data shows us that women
<http://wbg.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/De_HenauReed_WBG_GIAtaxben_briefing_2016_03_06.pdf>—and 

women of colour in particular—are disproportionately impacted.
<http://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/files/22056512/Emejulu_and_Bassel_Minority_Women_RaceClass_FINAL_14Oct15.pdf> 

Because women of colour, on the whole, are more likely to be public
sector employees but also living in the poorest households, cuts to
vital services, such as libraries, public transport and afterschool
care, translate into further immiseration as jobs are threatened and
household incomes decline. Even though people of colour are more likely
to be living in poverty and are being hit hardest by austerity measures, 
75% of voters of colour opted to remain in the EU
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-36616028>. What does a claim of
white victimhood mean in this context?

Whiteness as victimhood is also deployed in a much more insidious
fashion. Both before </books/1417-bloody-nasty-people> and after the
Brexit vote, previously ‘invisible’ and privileged white EU
migrants—excluding ‘white’ migrants from Eastern Europe who have been
and continue to be subject to institutionalised xenophobia as their
labour value is exploited—began to report feeling unwelcomed and unsafe.
These reports have combined with social media accounts of increased
racial harassment, leading to figures suggesting that such incidents
have risen 57% since the referendum
<https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jun/27/sadiq-khan-muslim-council-britain-warning-of-post-brexit-racism>. 

The sincerity of these claims of feeling unsafe, nor the legitimacy of
these reports of racist and xenophobic abuse, must not be doubted.But
whiteness, even in discussions about racism and anti-racism, can
intrude, appropriate and colonise these spaces in order to re-enforce an 
identity of victimhood, whilst at the same time seemingly
de-prioritising the interests and experiences of people of colour.

I do not seek nor desire a victim identity. I do, however, want public
acknowledgement, solidarity and collective action against Britain’s de
facto policy of indefinite detention of migrants; of everyday and
institutionalised Islamophobia </books/1765-the-muslims-are-coming> and
the state violence deployed against Sarah Reed, Sheku Bayoh and Jimmy
Mubenga
<http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2285-jimmy-mubenga-and-the-outsourcing-of-violence-by-antony-lowenstein> 

and other people of colour. What does it mean that those who now are
expressing ‘concern’ about a surge in xenophobia have previously had
little to say about everyday and institutionalised racism and violence
that people of colour experience? And that people of colour were not
taken at our word, as others have been, about what we experience? It
seems some people are only concerned with racism and xenophobia when
their own privileged migration status
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/24/country-increasingly-racist-austrian-uk-briton-netherlands-eu-referendum-result> 

is challenged.

*Whiteness As Innocence*

The spate of racist and xenophobic attacks in the aftermath of Brexit
also reveals another operation of whiteness—that of innocence. We can
see this manifested in three inter-related ways. First, public ‘shock’
and outrage about increases in racial harassment seem to define racism
as an aberration in Britain—that it only exists in relation to
extraordinary events such as the Brexit vote (‘This is not who we are’).
The framing of public outrage in this way seeks to treat whiteness as
innocent. But the wealth of this country was built
</books/1179-britain-s-empire> through colonial plunder, exploitation
and enslavement </books/473-the-making-of-new-world-slavery>. Our
contemporary social relations are imbued with and reflect this history.
To only understand racism as localised, reactionary inter-personal
violence is to misunderstand what Britain (and indeed Europe) is
<http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2294-when-did-we-come-to-britain-you-must-be-mistaken-britain-came-to-us> 

and the power relations that maintain and legitimise racial hierarchy.
But to acknowledge this history would mean coming to terms with the
arbitrariness of race and the racial order
</series_collections/33-the-invention-of-the-white-race>, of which there 
seems to be little appetite.

Secondly, whiteness also seeks absolution of responsibility through
performative outrage. Racial attacks that heretofore would have remained 
‘invisible’, ignored or subject to question (‘Aren’t you just being 
over-sensitive?’) now gain legitimacy through the white gaze. Now that 
some have decided to ‘see’ racism, it can, in a very limited and
non-threatening way, be named. Whiteness is thus recast as witness to
racism, but without any imperative to dismantle white supremacy, the
system of racial hierarchy remains firmly in place, with whiteness
preserved, unchallenged and intact.

Finally, whiteness cloaks itself in innocence by arriving late to scene
and adopting an identity of ‘ally’
<http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2309-we-have-to-think-intersectionally-yishay-garbasz-on-the-politics-of-allyship-and-solidarity>. 

I question those who now claim to stand shoulder to shoulder with me
<http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2303-from-blacklivesmatter-to-anti-austerity-women-of-colour-and-the-politics-of-solidarity> 

when they also maintain, without irony, that a focus on race and
“identity politics” fractures the left at a time of crisis
<http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2728-they-want-their-party-back> and
undermines class politics. I question those who now only seem to care
about racism and xenophobia when Brexit has used their bodies as
borders. I question those who now believe racism is real because they
have witnessed it with their own eyes. I also question those who seek to
extract from me and other people of colour our emotional labour
<http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2499-love-s-labour-s-cost-the-political-economy-of-intimacy> 

to absolve them of responsibility.

I am not looking for allies; I want collective action. We face an
uncertain future.

Let us be honest about our past and our present if we truly seek to
dismantle white supremacy.

/ /
/Dr. Akwugo Emejulu is Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh.
Her co-authored book, The Politics of Survival: Minority Women, Activism 
and Austerity in France and Britain is forthcoming with Policy Press./



-- 
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.