[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Younge on Racism

[Bill Totten]

by Hassan Mahamdallie

Socialist Review (June 2006)


Radical journalist Gary Younge talks to Hassan Mahamdallie about his
latest book Stranger In A Strange Land: Encounters In The Disunited
States (The New Press, 2006)


HM: Your book Stranger In A Strange Land is divided into four sections -
war, race, politics and culture. What are the overarching themes for you?

GY: One of the themes is division. I don't think people in Britain fully
understand how divided the US is. The era of former US president Bill
Clinton ended with one of the closest elections that we can remember  -
 one that George Bush had to steal in the end. So Bush, and the way that
he came to power, was an expression of division. Then for a brief
moment, around 9/11, the country was united  -  partly in pain and
grief, and partly in a form of superpower bellicosity.

Another division is race. That really came out after Hurricane Katrina.
African-Americans and white people saw the same things on their TVs but
understood completely different things. Another theme is that the US is
not as exceptional and brilliant as some people in the US would have you
believe  -  that "we're a great country, a generous people, a beautiful
people, we're God's own country". But also, it's not exceptionally bad
either. We shouldn't look at the US as being some kind of freakshow.
When we do that, we cordon off all possibilities of solidarity with
people in the US  -  there are large numbers of Americans who align
themselves with us. There isn't a big left, but there is a large kind of
liberal community which is really upset with what's going on.

Unlike us, the US had a revolution. The US has a constitution based on
basic principles, and there are large numbers of people who believe that
it is their mission to spread freedom  -  whatever they mean by that.
That many regard themselves as a liberating force is a mixture of
amnesia and historical ignorance about what the US has done.

While they sing "Land of the Free, Home of the Brave", we sing "God Save
the Queen". In Britain we don't feel the same sense of ownership of our
country as Americans do of theirs. For example, my wife is
African-American. She was raised by parents who grew up in the civil
rights era  -  they protested, and are dyed in the wool Democrats.
Nevertheless, she grew up thinking that the US was the best place in the
world, and that "America" and "democracy" were synonymous. I don't know
about you, but I grew up black in Britain and I never thought Britain
was the best place in the world.

In the US people go on anti-war demonstrations carrying the US flag,
with signs saying "Peace is Patriotic, Peace is the American Way".
Recently, I met Nichole, a 24 year old African-American woman who left
her baby behind with friends to join the army.

She came back and found herself homeless. When I met her she was in a
ramshackle place in Harlem  -  a real mess. She was really struggling
and didn't have a job, but nevertheless she believed that if she worked
really hard she could make it. And for me, that was the power of that
idea  -  people want to believe it.

In your book you talked to the writer Maya Angelou. She said that things
have changed for African-Americans, maybe not as much as you would want,
but there have been changes which should be celebrated. What do you
think of the changes she has referred to?

There is one way at looking at progress. It involves saying that black
people now have the right to be as every bit vicious as white people,
and in that sense progress has been made. Condoleezza Rice is killing
brown people  -  that's not the equality I was after. Maya cites
Condoleezza Rice as being an example of those advances. Of course, on
one level it's important that black people have the right to fuck up and
to be bad, but we have to separate progress of symbols and progress of
substance.

At a symbolic level, Condoleezza Rice does represent some kind of
progress, but if that's where we are going with this thing I'm getting
off the train now. Margaret Thatcher won the 1979 election, and that was
great for Margaret Thatcher, but I'm not sure it did much for women. It
didn't do much for the women in the pit communities, and, the fact that
Rice is secretary of state didn't do much for the people of the Lower
9th ward in New Orleans.

I'm going to try to explain through my own life why I'm glad that I grew
up in Britain. I grew up in a single parent family with two brothers. If
we had been born in the US, one of my brothers would be dead, in prison,
or on drugs. At eighteen years old I got my grades and I went to
university, and it didn't cost my family any money  -  of course that's
changed now, as we're going backwards  -  but that was my life. Then you
reach a point in Britain when you can't go any further, because Britain
doesn't know what to do with educated people who aren't white. That's to
do with institutional racism. My experience of getting a job at the
Guardian is all too rare. In the US there is a huge black middle class
-  better organised than the black working class  -  which has a place
in the system.

In an article about Martin Luther King you point out that integration
isn't the same as equality. But all the talk in Britain from government
and policy-makers is "integrate, integrate, integrate"  -  with equality
far behind. In the US the process of integration has been going on much
longer. What lessons can we learn from there?

First, that integration in the US was always a chimera. The Southern
states were always very integrated. African-American women breastfed
white kids, white slave-owners slept with their slaves, and for the most
part they lived in the same house, as most slave-owners didn't have much
money. So it was never about whether black people could hang out with
white people. It was on the basis of subservience, of white supremacy.

So with integration in the 1960s and 1970s, which was a step forward,
you had the right to go into any burger shop in town, but you didn't
have the money to buy that burger. So before integration you had "Whites
Only" signs on the doors which kept you out, and after integration it's
the menu that keeps you out, because you can't afford it.
African-Americans were never fighting for the right to sit next to a
white person in a restaurant  -  they wanted to be able to afford the
menu. It is economics.

Britain is a highly integrated country in all sorts of ways. But
integration has to be for a purpose. Unless we're moving towards
equality, then it's all really pretty meaningless. When we have
equality, integration will take care of itself.

Socialists and anti-racists have always looked for guidance to the US
experience  -  the civil rights movement, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers.
But reading what you have to say about black struggle in the US, I
wonder whether or not that is the right thing to do any more.

I don't believe it is. During the 1960s the needs of African-Americans
chimed with black people in the rest of the world  -  the fight for the
vote, for a level of autonomy, for basic civil rights. Muhammad Ali
could go to the Congo, James Brown could tour Africa, Maya Angelou could
live in Ghana. But then the interests diverged, and the issues have changed.

Martin Luther King's dream was rooted in the American dream. But after
African-Americans got the vote, you have to talk about economics, and
that's a different subject. During the Hurricane Katrina disaster, the
most prominent African-American voice wasn't Jesse Jackson, it was
rapper Kanye West, who said, "Bush doesn't care about black people.
America is set up to help the poor, the black people, the less well off,
as slow as possible."

The other thing is that being African-American is different to being
black. African-Americans are people who come from particular experiences
 -  slavery, segregation and integration. People from Africa or the
Caribbean aren't necessarily part of that tradition. The racial
landscape in Britain is far more ethnically mixed, and at certain
moments it involves anyone who isn't white.

Regardless of whether that is actually a good or bad thing, I am
grateful for it, because it means that our experience is not so
ethnically particular. And, because we are attached to other people, it
also means that our politics tend to be more internationalist.

For example, what happens at the World Trade Organisation affects my
family, because it affects sugar and banana production in Barbados.
Equally, what happens in south Asia affects young Pakistanis and
Bangladeshis. But African-Americans have been in America longer than
anyone, except the Native Americans and a few pilgrims, so the
attachment to the US is real and shouldn't be dismissed.

Do you think we've missed out in mapping the history of our black
struggle in Britain?

Absolutely. It always troubles me when Black History Month comes around.
We talk about Martin Luther King, but we don't talk about C L R James or
even Mary Seacole. There is a tradition of black British organising that
we should not only take pride in, but which is particular about our
situation. We never had codified segregation, and as a result we never
had a civil rights movement.

Our experience is very different to those in the US in all sorts of
ways. For example, one in three African-Caribbean men is in a
relationship with a white partner. We don't have areas that are
specifically black, like the Lower 9th ward in New Orleans, which is 98
percent African-American. That gives us opportunities in creating
alliances, but it also gives us problems if we try to organise on the
basis of race.

You wrote an article a few days after the 7/7 attacks on London called
"Blair's Blowback", where you argued there was a link between British
foreign policy and what those young men did in London. What do you think
of Blair's refusal to admit the link and his focus on the Muslim population?

It's weird to think you can declare war on terror and that terror won't
bite back. I was abroad when 7/7 happened, and I was reading writers in
all of the papers saying that this was nothing to do with the war on
terror, that 9/11 happened before the war in Iraq, and so on. I wondered
how they could sustain that argument. The answer was that they could
only sustain it if they kept on repeating it.

So I wrote "Blair's Blowback", and of course I attracted a lot of flak.
But there was an opinion poll a few days later which showed that most
British people believed there was a link between the two things  -  and
later, investigations showed there actually was a link. I described how
British people felt, and how Iraqi people must be feeling when their
country is being attacked.

What was interesting about 7/7, looking at it from the US, was how
different people's responses were to those following 9/11. There was no
big display of Union Jacks, and it didn't provoke a wave of nationalism.
It did provoke some increase in Islamophobia  -  but it could have been
a lot worse. This is where the anti-war movement came in. It had helped
to create a level of political maturity. We should always remember that
although we didn't stop the war, the world would look very different if
we weren't here.

After the police killed Jean Charles de Menenez, the Brazilian
electrician, I wrote about people whose response was, "Better safe than
sorry". I asked, "Who's safe and who's sorry?" Someone from the US wrote
to me and said, "God, I thought our country was bad  -  but if that had
happened in the US, first there'd be a riot, then some people would have
been suspended, then there would have been a report, then there would
have been a whitewash. You guys just went straight to the whitewash.
What is wrong with you people?"

Some people in Britain have a problem with Muslims organising themselves
by taking part in the anti-war movement and in political formations such
as Respect. Can we learn anything from the US civil rights movements
about the relationship between religion and the politics of change?

The civil rights movement is a very good example. Martin Luther King,
Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan all came out of religion. It was the only
base that black people could organise from. In the US you can see that
religion can be used in a reactionary way. But it can also be used in an
incredibly progressive way. If people are attacked on the basis of their
religion, then they will partly organise their response on a basis of
that religion.

Religion doesn't scare me. I'm not going to change my views on lesbian
and gay rights to satisfy an imam, and I wouldn't have changed them to
satisfy Martin Luther King either. But you choose to make connections on
the basis of where people are, otherwise you are choosing not to connect
with them at all.

With Muslims in Britain we have a group of people being attacked on the
basis of their religion, and I'm going to make connections with them. I
don't remember people saying about the Republican struggle in the north
of Ireland, "Ooh, Catholics!" The Republican struggle was broadly a
progressive struggle for national autonomy and was rightly supported.
Any movement worth its salt should be making alliances. We made
alliances in Nicaragua  -  we didn't turn them down because of the
position of the Catholic church on abortion.

It worries me that some people have been incapable of understanding the
response of the Muslim community in Britain. They can only critique what
Muslims are doing through religion  -  not through race, not through
class, not through internationalism, only through religion. What they
are really looking at is a reflection of their own prejudices, which is
a terrible way to go.
_____

Gary Younge's new book, Stranger in a Strange Land: Encounters In The
Disunited States, is published by The New Press and is available from
Bookmarks. Phone 020 7637 1848.

http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=9765


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